SAN FRANCISCO – Soon, you could get fewer familiar ads following you around the internet -- or at least on Facebook. Facebook is launching a long-promised tool that lets you limit what the social network can gather about you on outside websites and apps. The company said Tuesday that it is adding a section where you can see the activity that Facebook tracks outside its service via its "like" buttons and other means. You can choose to turn off the tracking; otherwise, tracking will continue the same way it has been. Formerly known as "clear history," the tool will now go by the slightly clunkier moniker "off-Facebook activity."

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task in online advertising systems. A large body of research considers each ad independently, but ignores its relationship to other ads that may impact the CTR. In this paper, we investigate various types of auxiliary ads for improving the CTR prediction of the target ad. In particular, we explore auxiliary ads from two viewpoints: one is from the spatial domain, where we consider the contextual ads shown above the target ad on the same page; the other is from the temporal domain, where we consider historically clicked and unclicked ads of the user. The intuitions are that ads shown together may influence each other, clicked ads reflect a user's preferences, and unclicked ads may indicate what a user dislikes to certain extent. In order to effectively utilize these auxiliary data, we propose the Deep Spatio-Temporal neural Networks (DSTNs) for CTR prediction. Our model is able to learn the interactions between each type of auxiliary data and the target ad, to emphasize more important hidden information, and to fuse heterogeneous data in a unified framework. Offline experiments on one public dataset and two industrial datasets show that DSTNs outperform several state-of-the-art methods for CTR prediction. We have deployed the best-performing DSTN in Shenma Search, which is the second largest search engine in China. The A/B test results show that the online CTR is also significantly improved compared to our last serving model.

You can request a folder of the things you have uploaded to or shared on Facebook from all your sessions on various devices--plus other curious information--to save on your computer. Once you unzip the folder, open the "index.htm" Right now, you'll see every Facebook friend you've ever had--plus the ones you've gotten rid of. You'll see all your videos, pictures, events, liked pages, private messages and timeline posts. Soon, Facebook will have an improved download tool, and include more information such as posts you've liked, your reactions and comments, even your search and location history. What isn't in this single download is a lot of the behind-the-scenes data that Facebook may use to increase engagement and target ads.

M6 Publicité and M6 Web Select Accenture's New Advertising Offering, Powered by Artificial Intelligence, To Target Ads More Effectively NEW YORK; Dec. 13, 2016 – M6 Publicité and M6 Web, Group M6 subsidiaries, have chosen Accenture's (NYSE: ACN) new Advanced Video Analytics offering that uses artificial intelligence to more accurately predict customer advertising preferences and serve targeted ads more effectively. M6 Group is the second largest private TV Group in France with major traditional TV channels such as M6, W9, and 6ter, as well as 6play, a free digital TV platform. M6 Publicité and M6 Web chose Accenture to implement a powerful data-driven advertising optimization tool run by a team of data scientists, analysts and developers. This data tool integrates several Accenture offerings including artificial intelligence that increases the number of users reached with targeted ads. Processing large amounts of historical user data, artificial intelligence can predict with more precision users' interests, behaviors, and purchasing actions.