Facebook Announces Video-Based Social App ‘Lifestage’ For High Schoolers

Facebook has released a new teens-only social app called “Lifestage” that asks users to create profiles by uploading video clips instead of filling in text fields.

The standalone app is aimed at high school kids aged 21 and under, and doesn’t require a Facebook account. Users are asked to select their high school and are then shown video profiles of people at the same school or ones nearby, as long as at least 20 people from the same school use the app.

User profiles ask kids to upload videos of their “happy face”, “sad face”, likes, dislikes, best friend, the way they dance, and more, and Lifestage turns the clips into a video profile that others can then watch on the app’s social feed.

While there’s no restriction on who can download the app and create an account, anyone 22 or older will only be able to see their own profile, although Lifestage notes during sign-up that it can’t verify that users are the age they say they are. The app includes various highly visible blocking and reporting options, apparently to guard against the possibility of suspect users.

TechCrunch reports that the app was designed by Michael Sayman, a 19-year-old Facebook product manager who aims to replicate Facebook’s original incarnation as a college student network. “I wanted to work on an app that my demographic would relate to, or at least that my friends would want to use,” said Sayman.

The launch of Lifestage is certainly consistent with Mark Zuckerberg’s stated goal of putting video at the heart of all of Facebook’s apps and services, but it also points to the company’s continuing concern at Snapchat’s surging popularity among younger users, which has already led Facebook to imitate several of the app’s features in its photo-focused social offering, Instagram.

Time will tell whether Lifestage succeeds in attracting a younger crowd, or goes the same way as Poke, Slingshot, Paper, and Notify, all of which Facebook eventually binned following a lack of uptake.

Lifestage is a free download for iPhone and iPad on the App Store. [Direct Link]

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Bigscreen’s ‘VR LAN party’ comes to the Oculus Store

Bigscreen’s promise to bring the environment of a LAN party into virtual reality is becoming more credible, now that it’s also available in the Oculus store. The free software has been “completely cross-platform” since launch, ready for sharing with friends using Oculus Rift and HTC Vive VR headsets, and now you can get it in a new place. As the name implies, it syncs a virtual space so people can show what’s on their desktop to everyone else, even if they’re not physically looking over your shoulder.

The software is also getting a big upgrade, with avatars that are customizable down to their hair, eyes, skin color, gender and glasses. It also claims pseudo eye-tracking and synced mouth movements to help increase the presence in VR (at least, as much as you can with a group of disembodied heads). Another new feature is that now everyone will be able to share their desktop audio, not just the host. That makes it easy for anyone to pull up a YouTube clip, start playing a game or listen to music, without shuffling things around so everyone can hear.

The new update should be available on Steam and Oculus right now.

Source: Oculus, Steam

Facebook’s point-based recruiting system isn’t producing diversity

Two years ago, Facebook proposed a system to make its workforce less universally white or Asian and male. The plan was to incentivize its in-house recruiters to hire diverse candidates, literally giving them more points for Hispanic, black and/or female candidates that would build a score directly applying to their performance reviews and bonuses. Unfortunately, the gains for more female employees are marginal and the racial makeup of the company hasn’t changed, and the method can be deemed a failure.

Facebook fessed up to their inability to substantially diversify their workforce but blamed it on an institutional lack of qualified candidates: There just aren’t enough coming up through the public education system, said the company’s global director of diversity in a blog post. Critics railed against that logic, pointing out that Hispanics and blacks make up 8 percent and 6 percent of computer science graduates, respectively, though they only represent 3 percent and 1 percent of Facebook’s workforce. The pipeline problem isn’t a myth, but it’s more fruitful than the tech scene portrays, as The New York Times put it.

To be clear, lack of diversity is rampant across Silicon Valley’s titans. As former Twitter recruiter Leslie Miley wrote in a blog post last November, the problem often lies in company culture: Candidates are sometimes deemed unqualified for how long it took them to finish college, or not going to the right schools or not finishing application tests quickly enough. That lack of contextual empathy results from tech’s homogeneous culture, and critics worry that diverse hires are seen as add-ons to a qualified pool, especially when recruiters are pressured to produce volumes of candidates in Silicon Valley’s competitive employment atmosphere.

Similarly troublesome were the methods Facebook recruiters used to find diverse hires and secure their bonus points. According to The Wall Street Journal, they looked for details in profiles to tip off their racial or gender status, like pictures, attendance at historically black colleges or membership in ethnic professional groups. But to get credit, candidates needed to identify their minority status during the application process. Further, if they applied to positions in departments that already employed diverse hires — for example, a female candidate seeking a job in communications or human resources where women were already represented — the recruiter didn’t receive bonus credit.

Ultimately, former Facebook recruiters told The Wall Street Journal that while some recruiters did identify more diverse groups of candidates, it wasn’t enough to overcome broader bias within Facebook and other tech companies for candidates who attended prestigious schools. But the Journal did identify some progress in the social giant: its new senior leader hires were more diverse, with 9 percent black and 5 percent Hispanic from July 2015 to July 2016.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Facebook is open-sourcing its AI bot-building research

Say hello to smarter artificial intelligence. Soon, anyway. Facebook is opening up the secret sauce that powers its bots so the public can employ and study it. This is part of the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) lab’s mission to help researchers and engineers by making its work available to all. Called fastText, the library of code is now available on Github for public use and scrutiny, and will require a compiler with “good C++11 support.”

The biggest appeal of fastText appears to be speed and efficiency. According to Facebook, fastText is, as its name suggests, much quicker than other learning methods, and can train models “on more than 1 billion words in less than 10 minutes using a standard multicore CPU.” In fact, FAIR claims that, compared to deep learning models, fastText can cut training delays from several days to a few seconds.

fastText focuses on classifying words and sentences, and produces libraries that programs can reference when executing tasks. For example, fastText can learn that the words “boy,” “girl,” “man” and “woman” refer to specific gendered nouns and store those values in a document. Then, when an AI program, like a bot, is interpreting a request, such as “Where my girls at,” it can look into the fastText-generated document and understand that the user is asking for female names.

It’s easy to see how this move makes sense for the social network. It started integrating chat bots in its Messenger app this year, and making it easier to train AI can boost the growth of third-party offerings. Considering the proliferation of AI integration in many of its competitors, such a move can also encourage developers to focus on building for Facebook’s platform first.

In a statement, FAIR said, “Ultimately, we hope that fastText will help us all design better applications and further advance the research in language understanding.” Perhaps future AI developers can look to FAIR’s research for help, which for now appears to be a far more sensible resource than Reddit.