As part of the Center for Data Science’s mission to link students with tech industry leaders, we hold weekly lunch information sessions with representatives from companies employing data scientists in innovative ways. A few weeks ago, we invited Lars Backstrom, Facebook’s Director of Engineering, to come and chat with our students about his work and how Facebook uses data science.
For the past three years, Backstrom has been responsible for engineering the backend infrastructure for Facebook’s News Feed, one of the domineering aspects of Facebook’s user experience. As any Facebook user will tell you, certain stories posted on the site are more interesting than others, and it’s Backstrom’s job to implement algorithms that organize a user’s News Feed with the most important content at the top. Obviously, evaluating the quality or importance of an individual piece of content is entirely subjective, and so Backstrom and his team use quantifiable interactions (liking, posting, and commenting), along with analysis of the stories you share with your own friends, in order to determine which stories are the most interesting to users like yourself.