Aligning recommender systems as cause area

Abstract

The most popular recommender systems - the Facebook news feed, the YouTube homepage, Netflix, Twitter - are optimized for metrics that are easy to measure and improve, like number of clicks, time spent, number of daily active users, which are only weakly correlated with what users care about. One of the most powerful optimization processes in the world is being applied to increase these metrics, involving thousands of engineers, the most cutting-edge machine learning technology, and a significant fraction of global computing power.