Activity

The instructor asks us to look for patterns in the space, and the students find one: the movies seem to have separated by genre. Romances are on one side, while action movies are on the other. A student asks how the algorithm knew about genre, when the input only contained rating data. "It seems li…

[...] he has just finished an internship at a large software company known for such techniques, and he is convinced that feature learning is the future. He derisively calls feature representations like MFCCs "handcrafted," suggesting that they are archaic and ready to be replaced.

Today [...] bandwidth constraints are largely considered a thing of the past, and recommender systems are no longer commonly framed as techniques for optimizing the bandwidth of a computer network. When people suggest that recommender systems are necessary to manage an overwhelming amount of inform…

[...] Across disciplines undergoing "cognitive turns," key concepts were thus reinterpreted as filtering methods, which protected limited minds from overload. Cognitive anthropology, for instance, reconceptualized culture and classification as an adaptive technique for coping with an overwhelming w…

Mythological discourse is conventionally understood to be concerned with form over content abstract types over concrete instances. Roland Barthes (1972, 143) has argued that myths' abstraction lets them function as "depoliticized speech": by tying together timeless cosmic orders and ordinary histor…