[mendeza]

Why is Facebook getting into reinforcement learning? Are there applications of RL to improving social connections or extracting more data to sell to advertisers?

[civicsquid]

If you take a look at the announcement post for the framework, you can see some discussion about that: https://code.fb.com/ml-applications/horizon/

One application that they mention related (at least loosely) to social connections is deciding whether or not to deliver a notification to a user.

[eismcc]

That makes sense. At Twitter, I redesigned the notifications system to explicitly allow for ML based decisions such as this.

[b_tterc_p]

Any idea on what the objective function for such a thing would be?

[taneq]

I'd imagine that a company which exists entirely to collect huge amounts of data might have some interest in useful ways to automatically process that data.

[bobbygoodlatte]

Most likely to make the News Feed more engaging