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from the now-let's-work-on-human-intelligence dept.
A recent Wired article tells us about the progression of the Amazon product recommendation algorithm.
Amazon helped show the world how machines can learn. As far back as the late ’90s, the company’s online retail site would track every book, CD, and movie you purchased. As time went on, it would develop a pretty good sense of what you liked, serving up product recommendations its code predicted would catch your eye.
It wasn't rocket science. It was an algorithm. But it worked. And in the years since, the field of so-called machine learning has evolved in enormous ways, with the likes of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft training enormous networks of machines to identify faces in photos, recognize the spoken word, and instantly translate conversations from one language to another.
On Thursday, Amazon unveiled a similar machine learning service, pitching it as a way for any business to use the AI tech the company has spent years developing inside its own operation. Known as the Amazon Machine Learning Service, it’s designed for software developers “with no experience in machine learning,” AWS head Andy Jassy said on stage at a mini-conference in San Francisco.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JNCF on Saturday April 11 2015, @05:14PM
I occasionally buy things from Amazon, but not frequently. My experience is the same as yours; after I look at or buy a given item, it recommends that item and similar items to me. That being said, I may not be the best data set for Amazon's recommendations. The more we buy, the easier we are to predict.
I remember reading a (Wired?) article that said that Amazon has shipment hubs that they keep packages in, and that they pre-emptively ship products to hubs near a given customer if they are predicting that the customer will purchase the product soon. This allows them cut shipping times drastically for frequent customers whose behavior is easy to predict, sometimes getting products delivered the same day they're ordered. Other times they guess wrong, and the product sits on the shelf at a given hub for a while. Sometimes they make the decision that give the product to the frequent customer as a "gift," which saves Amazon the cost of shipping it back to their main hubs and ingratiates the customer by giving them something that they probably actually wanted.