相对比过去几年硅谷科技公司一味追求发布会的排场和舞台效果，近两年受到疫情影响，谷歌、苹果、Facebook等公司线上发布会反倒是更有了各家自己的特色。
Friday, June 4, 2021
Facebook F8: 2021 | Ecommerce business | My 20 minutes study
MGM stock | Beginner - active investor | Hundreds of hours learning | Case study
I purchased MGM stock back in June 26, 2020. I learned the lesson. It is better to purchase MGM 300 shares and hold it, now the price is almost tripled. Compared to PED and PK, MGM stock is a best choice.
Las Vegas businesses, now without COVID-19 restrictions, struggle to find willing workers
Las Vegas, Nevada, open at 100% capacity as of June 1
LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Las Vegas and Nevada are now open for business without capacity limits or social distancing requirements but a pandemic problem persists and finding willing workers to apply for open positions remains a struggle.
For months, small and large businesses have reported the number of willing applicants for open jobs has been very low.
Thursday, June 3, 2021
Grammarly | Engineering | Vipul Raheja | Under the Hood at Grammarly: Understanding Conversational Sequences with AI
June 3, 2021
Under the Hood at Grammarly: Understanding Conversational Sequences with AI
A majority of our communication now happens
online, through social media, discussion forums, and online conversations.
People have been talking together online now for nearly four decades, giving
rise to a very active area of research: understanding online communication. But
online conversations aren’t always human-to-human interactions. Computers work
alongside human professionals to provide customer support. Chatbots market
products and enable customers to make purchases. Smart-home devices and voice
assistants have enabled hands-free operation through voice commands. And
businesses are replacing cluttered UI with intuitive natural language
interfaces. As conversational interfaces like these become more ubiquitous,
understanding how online conversations work is more essential than ever in
creating a fulfilling and productive experience for the people who engage with
them. After all, in order for a chatbot to help you book the right plane
tickets or suggest a good restaurant, it needs to understand what you’re
looking for.
Computer scientists call this area of research “Dialogue
Understanding,” and it’s the subject of new research from
Grammarly that will appear at the NAACL conference in Minneapolis this week.
What
are dialogue acts—and why care about them?
Before diving into the details of our algorithms, let’s take a
look at an example of a typical conversation:
Maddie: Hey
James! Greeting
Maddie: How have you been? Greeting-Question
James: Hey Maddie! Greeting
James: Doing alright, thanks! Greeting-Answer
Maddie: So what did you do this weekend? Question
James: Well, uh, pretty much spent most of my
time in the yard. Statement
Maddie: Uh-Huh. Backchannel
Maddie: What do you have planned for your
yard? Question
James: Well, we’re in the process of revitalizing
it. Statement-non-opinion
…
Maddie: Florida is pretty good about recycling
isn’t it? Yes-No-Question
James: Well, they just kicked it off down here
in Sarasota County. Dispreferred
answers
Maddie: Oh, they did? Backchannel-question
James: Yeah, they started first in Sarasota
city. Statement-non-opinion
In the above conversation, each response is called an utterance, and each
utterance is labeled with what is called a dialogue act. To guide the flow of
conversations, dialogue acts (such as greeting, question, opinion, request,
etc.) are useful identifiers of the general intent of an utterance. When
combined with the overall topic of a conversation, they can help immensely in
natural language understanding (NLU)—the technology that enables the
development of conversational systems. In the above conversation, it is easy to
see how the conversation naturally flows from greetings and pleasantries to
asking questions and exchanging information. In order for a conversational
system to engage in a conversation that feels natural to a human partner, it
needs to keep up with this natural flow. And to that end, it must be able to
correctly identify the intent of each utterance. If the system knows that the
previous two utterances were a greeting and
a question,
it can formulate a more suitable response.
A system that understands the natural flow of a conversation has
applications that go beyond just chatting directly with humans. It could, for
example, transcribe a business meeting and autonomously generate a high-quality
summary of the important points. Or it could help enable a smooth conversation
between two people from different backgrounds or professions. In the context of
conversational flow, identifying dialogue acts is the first step toward building
such an NLU system. It’s the fundamental task that other downstream components
of an NLU system would build on. Hence, accurately identifying dialogue acts is
a crucial task.
What we did
We built a deep
learning model to learn to tag a sequence of utterances in a conversation. Deep
learning is an area of AI that’s based on artificial neural networks, that
involves teaching an algorithm to perform tasks automatically by showing it
lots of examples rather than by providing a series of rigidly predefined steps.
We drew from recent advances in natural language processing (NLP), such as
self-attention, hierarchical deep learning models, and contextual dependencies,
to produce a dialogue act classification model that is effective across
multiple domains.
High-level model architecture (for more
details, please refer to the paper)
We trained our model
on two standard datasets for the task—the Switchboard Dialogue Act Corpus (SwDA) consisting
of 43 classes, and the 5-class version of the ICSI
Meeting Recorder Dialogue Act Corpus (MRDA) corpus. We used the same
method to evaluate our system on these datasets as Lee
and Dernoncourt (2016).
What we
found
Once the models were
trained, we tested them on a set of conversations in the dataset that the model
had not yet seen. We found that the model outperformed leading models on the
Switchboard dataset, and came quite close to being the best on MRDA.
Experimenting with different ways of learning an utterance representation led
to many insights about conversational understanding. One is that conversations
are contextual—a system is highly empowered by seeing what has been said
before, and performs much better when it properly learns the progression of a
conversation. Another is that conversations are noisy. This makes them hard to
understand, especially if they are long since the context cannot be modeled
appropriately. This calls for more robust modeling techniques. And another is
that conversations have a hierarchical dependency—representations learned at
the utterance level can affect what the system models at the conversation
level.
Looking
forward
Dialogue Act
Classification is just the first step. There’s a lot more work to be done in
understanding conversations and a lot of exciting applications for a system
that can reliably classify dialogue acts in a conversation. One day, a system
like this could not only tell you how a conversation is going but also help you
understand what is being said, and how to craft an appropriate response to what
is being said — leading to higher quality conversations.
As for Grammarly,
this work is yet another step toward our vision of creating a comprehensive
communication assistant that helps you understand another person’s message, and
have your message be understood just as intended.
Actionable Items
Introduction to Machine Learning Problem Framing Courses Practica Guides Glossary
Here is the link.
I did spend 20 minutes to read the article. I like to start to learn machine learning course by myself. It is day one for me. I just could not believe how busy I was, and I did not have curiosity to learn last 10 years.
Life is tough. I have to compete with so many options to choose this machine learning.
How to live a health life? | My thoughts | Actively invest on stock market | 8 KM walk a day | Machine learning crash course
June 3, 2021
Introduction
I like to work on a short research about health life, my age and weight loss plan. I was so tired after two hours walk yesterday, I started to think about pain, leg pain; how to live a health life? NOK stock position went up and my gains on the position was around $2,000 dollars, AMC stock went up $60/ share, and I still remembered the days Anna in wechat group told us to purchase when it was around $2/ share in January 2021. I am thinking about learning machine learning, and figure out pattern those meme stock and wallstrbet, and how to help me make plan, catch a 30 bagger stock with 10,000 shares, for example, AMC, $2/ share, Jan. 2021. The research is too broad to put into one paragraph.
My research
I will start to think about more when I start to walk.
May 8, 2020 | Layoffs in pandemic | Office space in Seattle | More about technology companies
What do the Airbnb, Lyft, and
Uber layoffs mean for Seattle engineering outposts?
BY TAYLOR SOPER on
Silicon Valley
engineering outposts have added an interesting dynamic to Seattle’s burgeoning
tech community over the past 15 years. More than 125 of these centers now
operate from Bellevue to Belltown, representing thousands of tech workers at
companies such as Apple, eBay, HBO, Oracle and Sonos, according to GeekWire data.
But in the era of
COVID-19 — with layoffs hitting tech companies and office expansion cooling —
the future of at least some of these outposts as an engine for tech job growth
is uncertain.
This is especially the
case as hard hit companies like Uber, Lyft, Compass and Airbnb — all of which
have expanded to Seattle in recent years — cut workforces.
- Earlier this week, Uber laid
off 3,700 employees, or 14% of its staff, citing decreased trip
volume. The company was one of the first Silicon Valley giants to
establish a Seattle-area engineering center and employed 450 people in the
region last year.
- Ride-hailing rival Lyft slashed 17%
of its workforce last week; it landed in Seattle five years ago
and expanded
its presence in 2017. Lyft and Uber are cutting expenses as
fewer people need rides while cities around the globe shut down.
- With travel on hold,
Airbnb laid off
about 25% of its employees this week. The hospitality company
had been growing its Seattle footprint over the past few years and inked a
lease for a 58,300 square feet space in downtown Seattle
earlier this year.
- Heavily-funded New York-based
real estate brokerage Compass laid off 15% of its staff, or about 375
employees, in March. The company opened a
large new Seattle tech center this past September, right in the
middle of Amazon’s headquarters campus in the South Lake Union neighborhood.
When contacted by
GeekWire this week, representatives for Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb declined to
comment on the impact of layoffs on their Seattle operations. Compass also
declined to provide details on the number of Seattle-specific cuts.
Google, which sparked
the Silicon Valley influx in the Seattle region 15 years ago and now has about
4,500 employees in the area, said it would “significantly
slow down the pace of hiring” across the company this year. Facebook, with more
than 5,000 Seattle-area workers, still plans to hire an
additional 10,000 people this year.
If the engineering centers pull back on hiring, it may weaken
the tech talent pipeline coming into Seattle and stunt the growth of the
region’s tech ecosystem more broadly. It also could allow some opportunistic companies
— those who are accelerating their offerings and benefitting from the pandemic
— to expand.
GeekWire reported Thursday on companies that are still
hiring despite the economic downturn, taking advantage of an influx
of recently-laid off tech workers.
There may also be implications for Seattle’s startup scene. An
ongoing concern has been that the Silicon Valley giants could prevent Seattle from
realizing its potential as a startup hotbed, keeping talent
away from promising upstarts that can’t match the high salaries and generous
benefits offered at the powerhouses.
However, the engineering centers also serve as a launchpad for
budding entrepreneurs who can gain valuable experience before launching their
own Seattle-based startups.
With some of the well-funded out-of-town companies slowing
growth, it could hurt the region’s commercial real estate market. Brian Biege
and Matt Walters of real estate firm CBRE say it’s too early to tell how the
layoffs will affect engineering center expansion in Seattle.
“There is still plenty of rumored growth in the tech market,”
they said in an email. “However, much if not all is at a standstill while local
stay-at-home orders remain in place.”
According to a report from Colliers International, some of the
largest lease commencements in the fourth quarter of 2019 were tied to
technology companies not headquartered in the Seattle area. Those included a
200,000 square-foot space for Indeed, a 177,000 square-foot space for Google,
and a 121,000 square-foot space for Dropbox.
University of Washington computer science professor Ed Lazowska
has closely watched the growth of Seattle’s engineering centers for years.
“It’s going to be a tough few years for everyone, and this
includes much of tech. There will be less hiring,” said Lazowska, adding that
“we have seen this movie before — in 2000 and in 2008.”
Even with that grim prognosis, Lazowska said that “the factors
that make Seattle attractive for engineering centers are factors that persist.”
Related: How the Silicon
Valley tech invasion has reshaped Seattle’s startup landscape, 15 years after
it began
Facebook: Pandemic | Facebook Seattle director | Geekwire
Q&A: Facebook’s new chief in Seattle on 23 years at Microsoft and the future of engineering centers
Rajeev Rajan first came to the Seattle area as a
Microsoft intern in 1994, and ended up staying with the company for 23 years.
Four years into a new career at Facebook, Rajan is working to bring other
engineers to the region to continue to grow the social media giant’s sizable
hub of more than 7,000 employees.
Rajan
is currently vice president of engineering and head of Facebook for the Pacific
Northwest, the second largest engineering hub for the company outside of
Silicon Valley. He started at the company on its Marketplace platform,
supporting engineering before moving to support the video engineering team.
Rajan
— who replaced Vijaye Raji in leading the thousands of Facebook
employs who work in the region — is not slowing down the company’s amazing
growth spurt in the past 11 years. “We are going to be looking for real estate
all over the place,” he said.
GeekWire caught up with Rajan to discuss his long tech career,
Facebook’s continued growth in the Seattle region, the future of engineering
centers and remote work, and navigating Facebook’s much-publicized troubles.
Keep reading for our Q&A, edited for length and clarity.
Microsoft
vs. Facebook
GeekWire: 23
years at Microsoft is like a lifetime. Talk about the differences and the
similarities between Microsoft and Facebook, the culture and everything around
that.
Rajan: “I had a very wonderful time at Microsoft, super happy
there. I started as an intern on Windows 95, came right out of school. I was at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I was actually doing a PhD
program, but then I happened by chance to come for an internship in the summer
of ’94, fell in love with the Seattle area and Microsoft and stayed on full
time. I did not actually go back and finish my PhD, I just joined the fun and
the party. I worked on many different things over the years — Windows operating
system, Exchange server, email, SQL server. Towards the end, the last few
years, I was part of the team that built Office 365, which was super successful
for the company.
“Along the way, they made me a distinguished
engineer and I left as VP of engineering. So I was doing really well and happy
there and with a great team. I happened to know somebody who knew [former
Facebook Seattle site lead] Vijaye [Raji], so Vijaye called me over to the
Seattle office for lunch. I was really struck by the energy I saw there and
just the office itself and the people I met. Vijaye suggested that I go to
Menlo Park and meet some leaders. So I flew down and met with some folks there.
I was again, super impressed with the Menlo Park campus.
“I guess inside me, I was thinking, ‘Do I do
another innings? Or do I finish it up at Microsoft?’ I felt like, perhaps I
could try a different thing. Back in the day in Seattle, Microsoft used to be
the only choice, or Amazon. And now we have much more opportunity in the
Seattle area. So I was like, ‘OK, let me try something new and different.’ Also
it reminded me very much of Microsoft in the ’90s. The company was much
smaller, I felt the same energy, Zuck is a little bit like Gates in terms of
the founder/CEO. I just felt that was sort of like Microsoft, but 30 years in
the future in terms of generational shift and things the company’s working on,
and also just the impact you can have on society in terms of the broad scale
set of what Facebook does seemed very appealing. The culture really was the
thing that attracted me and I felt like it should be a good change for me.”
Facebook in Seattle
GeekWire: Talk
a little about Facebook in Seattle — how many folks are here now?
Rajan: “Right now we have more than 7,000 people total in the
Pacific Northwest. We started in 2010, one of the first offices outside of
Menlo Park. It’s the biggest hub outside of Menlo Park for Facebook. We started
in Redmond in 2014 and then Bellevue in 2019. And so now we are all across the
region. We are super excited about our new Bellevue campus that is opening. The
buildings are ready to go and but for the pandemic, we would have opened up
already. We also bought the REI headquarters over
in Spring District. Given the buildings we already had and the REI
headquarters, we now have a nice hub, or campus, if you will. We think it could
be very similar to what we call the ‘classic campus.’ It affords an opportunity
for a lot of talent on the Eastside that previously might not have wanted to
make the trip across the lake to commute.”
GeekWire: Is
Spring District and what you mentioned in Bellevue going to impact South Lake
Union or are you going to stick around down there?
Rajan: “We’re going to stick around. We love the
South Lake Union area. We have a number of buildings there. We’re growing in
general in the region, Facebook as a company is growing quite a bit. And we’re
definitely looking to tap into the capacity in the Pacific Northwest. So we are
going to be looking for real estate all over the place. Eastside is great to
have a location, but Seattle, if we find good properties, we’ll expand there.
So we’re not looking to move out of Seattle, we’re looking to expand in all the
different areas.”
GeekWire: How important is Seattle to Facebook
overall? You mentioned it’s the biggest hub outside of Menlo Park. Why did it
become that way? What about Seattle made sense?
Rajan: “I think lots of things. First of all, I
think Facebook was one of the early companies to open a hub. Now every Silicon
Valley company, I think, has an office in Seattle… I think there are many
reasons that drove that, one was we knew that there’s a lot of good talent in
the region. It has all the elements of a great tech hub, which has proven to be
the case. And so because of our early start, we were able to start many teams
and products and projects in Seattle. For example, one of the first teams I
joined in Facebook was Marketplace. And Marketplace was completely built in
Seattle.
We are human beings. We get a
lot of energy from each other. So the office is definitely going to be a big
part of our future.
“When you look at some
of the Silicon Valley companies, they tend to start in the Bay Area and then
have maybe a smaller team in Seattle. Even Microsoft is famously very Redmond
centric. With Facebook, I think the philosophy has been we want to be distributed
across many different locations. So having more locations outside the Bay Area
was part of the strategy. We have Seattle, we have New York, we have Boston, we
have London, we even have one in Tel Aviv. So we have a few locations around
the world and from the beginning the philosophy was we want these locations to
really work and we want to be able to create products in these locations that
are not necessarily Menlo Park-based. We started Marketplace in Seattle, we
started Gaming in Seattle, we have a big presence in Groups and Community. And
we also have, now over time, all of the parts of the Facebook family of apps
represented in Seattle, from infrastructure all the way to the Facebook
products. Therefore, if you join Facebook in the Pacific Northwest, you can
work on pretty much anything that Facebook works on.”
GeekWire:
Anything that’s coming or products or services that you’re working on now that
are particularly noteworthy or that you’re excited about?
Rajan: “We do have a
big presence in Redmond and a little bit in Seattle around Oculus and the
Facebook Reality Labs. Obviously AR and VR are a big future trend for the
company as well as for the world. I personally run the video engineering team
and we did a few announcements recently, and Mark did a few announcements,
around audio. One thing that’s come out of COVID is we are all on these Zoom
meetings and it’s a little tiring to be on video all the time. So imagine you
had a meeting like this, it’s all audio, you’re walking outside, enjoying the good
weather and you’re just talking. We think audio has a big future.”
Remote work
GeekWire: Let’s talk a little bit about remote work and your
back-to-office plans, Seattle specifically. Do you have a percentage on who you
expect back and when and what your offices are going to look like in a
post-pandemic world? You’ve mentioned a lot of real estate.
Rajan: “I think the office is always going to be a big part of
our future. In terms of getting back to the office, we’re looking at the health
data locally. We are being super conservative with respect to what’s a good
timing for it. We’ll probably have some 10, 20%, some small percentage return
to office somewhere perhaps in the July timeframe if things work out right.
That small percentage is for people who are actually struggling to work from
home right now. We’d like to give them an opportunity to come back in a little
bit. But the really big return to office will be in the September, October
timeframe. We already signaled that to employees because we wanted them to make
summer plans and not be in a situation, ‘Are we going back? Are we not going
back?'”
GeekWire: [Amazon’s] Andy Jassy said something in an
interview about how the ability to innovate is just better in
person. Do you share that viewpoint?
Rajan: “Absolutely.
We are human beings. We get a lot of energy from each other — hallway chats,
whiteboard drawings, all kinds of things. So the office is definitely going to
be a big part of our future. Now I do think we’ll be competitive with the tech
industry in the world in terms of what is a flexible option. Maybe, I don’t
know, a day of the week you’re working from home, something along those lines.
Even for people who are working in the office, there’ll be some flexible
options.
“Then
there’ll be a set of people like Mark said, who will be completely remote. They
can choose to be completely remote. We think that’s a big future where you
could be not even staying in the Seattle area. You could be living in different
states and cities in the U.S. and you can work remotely from home. I do think
for those people, they will want to come into the office maybe once or twice a
month to meet people in person and get some connections, but for the most part,
they can work remotely.”
Future
of engineering centers
GeekWire: That leads us to the future
of engineering centers and whether you think the pandemic will have impacted
that, whether fewer companies will see the need to set up these satellite
offices away from their headquarters, with this rise in remote work. Or whether
we’re just going to have a short-term memory on that and we’ll get back to
business.
Rajan: “I think that
the aggregate demand for engineers is just going up. I think technology is a
good force for society in general. I do think there’s a lot more innovation to
be had, whether it’s AR, VR, AI, or all kinds of exciting new trends. So
there’s going to be a bigger demand for talent in general, which means that the
engineering centers are going to continue to grow and we’re going to need more
of them around the U.S. and around the world.
RELATED: Track the engineering outposts in the Seattle area
“But
I do think some of that demand will be met by remote work. And I think that
will afford a bunch of people the ability to work from other states or other
cities, who don’t have to be in the big city or in the big center, where
previously you had to be in Seattle or the Bay Area to work for Facebook. Now
you could be in maybe Eastern Washington or closer to Portland, you have more
choice on terms of where you stay and work. So we get that talent, but we’ll
also get a bunch of people who are in the major hubs.”
Future of Facebook
GeekWire: It’s been an interesting couple of years, the company
itself is dealing with a lot — the connection between social media and
adolescents or mental health; various conflicts that come up such as Israel and
Palestine; COVID-related misinformation; the Trump ban that reared its head
again. I like to have your perspective since you’re in Seattle. As an
engineering leader, how much of this, if any of it, affects your team and your
morale and how do you deal with it?
Rajan: “It’s definitely not easy. When you have all this stuff
being told about your company and so on, it’s not easy, but I think as
engineers we come in with the feeling of, ‘How can we make society better? How
can we make all the technology work for good?’ Any tool or any technology can
be used in good ways and bad ways, and we’re seeing some of the bad usages of
it. So we come in motivated with, ‘We think we can use AI, we think we can use
technology, we think we can use a combination of technology and people to make
this be a force for good.’
I think most engineers and
most people who work at the big tech companies want to do good and are finding
ways to use technology to help society.
“For example, when
COVID happened, we came up with this COVID-19 hub in the Facebook app where you
can find all kinds of authentic information — Where’s my nearest vaccination
center? What is the latest science on the vaccines or on masks? Things like
that. So we did our best to provide the right information to a lot of people,
so that once they get that information, they’re not getting misinformation from
other places.
“Having groups come
together on the platform to help each other is amazing, that really makes me
feel excited about all the good we are doing. And when I see bad effects, that
motivates me to go and say, ‘OK, how do we go fight this now? How do we make it
so that this does not happen?’ And so that’s kind of like the energy that the
company has. Yes, of course, it’s always tough when you see coverage that’s not
great, but I lived some of this at Microsoft as well. At that time we thought
we were building great technology for the world. So I think most engineers and
most people who work at the big tech companies want to do good and are finding
ways to use technology to help society.”
GeekWire: As more
pressure has come to bear on Facebook and Google and Amazon, and Microsoft has
sort of slid underneath all of that, what do you think about that?
Rajan: “I think Microsoft went through its moment and they
learned from it and they navigated some of those forces and are in a different
place right now. Every technology has its kind of flashpoint in terms of it
getting to critical mass and scale — Google with the search engine, Amazon with
its thing, Facebook with the tools we have built to reach people. So when those
tools reach a critical mass and become an important part of society I think it
leads to a lot of questions and discussion and what’s the right usage of it.
And so I think this is just a normal part of getting to critical mass.”
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