The History and Future of Machine Learning at Reddit

Walkthrough on history of ML at Reddit from it's original days in 2006 to where we are today, including the pitfalls and mistakes made as well as our current ML projects and future efforts in the space. Covering data platform, ML efforts around feed ranking, recommendations, user and subreddit similarity, as well as business results achieved and how we measure those through our experiments systems.

Anand Mariappan is the Senior Director of Engineering for the Knowledge group at Reddit, the 5th most visited site in the US. In his role, Anand is leading the team building an industry-leading AI discipline encompassing our search, relevance, discovery and signals efforts. He was also responsible for overseeing the Reddit Redesign, native video platform and the subreddit experiences for consumers, creators, and moderators across mobile and web. Prior to Reddit, Anand spent eight years at Microsoft in various engineering leadership roles working on compilers, data analysis tools, mobile apps and business applications. Anand's most notable role was as Engineering Manager for the PowerBI app experiences and cloud services team, in which he helped to drive the product as it scaled from 0 to 5 Million subscribers.