How Facebook uses deep learning models to engage users

Facebook achieved web dominance by riding a business model of understanding users and feeding them tailored content and advertising. And as the social networking company further builds on its strong position, it leans heavily on deep learning models. "These kinds of deep learning techniques have been really important over the last couple years," said Andrew Tulloch, an artificial intelligence researcher at Facebook. In a presentation at the Deep Learning Summit in Boston, Tulloch said traditional predictive analytics techniques like logistic regressions used to be the state of the art at Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook. In particular, this sort of analytics powered the ranked news feed, in which users are shown posts they're likely to find interesting, as determined by an algorithm.