What were the main advances in machine learning/artificial intelligence in 2016? - Quora

Let me also mention some of the advances in my main area of expertise: Recommender Systems. Of course Deep Learning has also impacted this area. While I would still not recommend DL as the default approach to recommender systems, it is interesting to see how it is already being used in practice, and in large scale, by products like Youtube. That said, there has been interesting research in the area that is not related to Deep Learning. The best paper award in this year's ACM Recsys went to "Local Item-Item Models For Top-N Recommendation", an interesting extension to Sparse Linear Methods (i.e.