philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Netflix moves into deep learning research to improve personalization

In a blog post published earlier today, Netflix research engineers Alex Chen, Justin Basilico, and Xavier Amatriain talked about ways the movie-streaming company has been experimenting with the construction of artificial neural networks using Nvidia graphic processing units (GPUs) running in Amazon Web Services’ vast public-cloud infrastructure. In other words, these new methods could do things like improve your video recommendations by mimicking how your brain works.

The blog post doesn’t explain the specific purposes of the research, only that it’s for “personalization” of recommendations for each user. The company does, however, go into detail about specific experiments with different types of GPUs and training efforts.

Even if we don’t know exactly what’s being planned, it’s significant when a company like Netflix — which has lots of users, lots of data, and lots of infrastructure to tap — enters the emerging, hype-heavy realm of deep learning. Such work entails making inferences based on the data that’s available, whether it be a photo, a video, text, or something else. It also suggests commercial value (aka video recommendations) could be closer than we might think.

See the full post here: http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/10/netflix-moves-into-deep-learning-research-to-improve-personalization/?utm_source=MESA+Email+Newsletter&utm_campaign=eea53bef61-my_google_analytics_key&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f57b24d15f-eea53bef61-87184857