Learning To Rank Diversely

by Malay Haldar, Liwei He & Moose AbdoolAirbnb connects millions of guests and Hosts everyday. Most of these connections are forged through search, the results of which are determined by a neural network–based ranking algorithm. While this neural network is adept at selecting individual listings for guests, we recently improved the neural network...

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Making Airbnb’s Android app more accessible

By: Julia Fu, Peter ElliottAt Airbnb, we have been consciously designing and building products to be equally usable by all users. Making our mobile apps and websites more accessible not only aligns with our company’s mission of creating a world where people can belong anywhere, but also supports the civil rights of people with disabilities and complies...

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When a Picture Is Worth More Than Words

How Airbnb uses visual attributes to enhance the Guest and Host experienceBy Yuanpei Cao, Bill Ulammandakh, Hao Wang, and Tony HwangIntroductionOn Airbnb, our hosts share unique listings all over the world. There are hundreds of millions of accompanying listing photos on Airbnb. Listing photos contain crucial information about style and design aesthetics...

Dec 2022

Motion Engineering at Scale

How Airbnb is applying declarative design patterns to rapidly build fluid transition animationsBy: Cal StephensMotion is a key part of what makes a digital experience both easy and delightful to use. Fluid transitions between states and screens are key for helping the user preserve context as they navigate throughout a feature. Quick flourishes of animation...

Dec 2022

Announcing Lottie 4.0 for iOS

A new rendering engine with significant performance improvements powered by Core AnimationBy: Cal StephensLottie is Airbnb’s cross-platform, open source library for rendering vector motion graphics. We use Lottie extensively at Airbnb, and it also powers animations in thousands of other apps throughout the industry.Example Lottie animations included...

Dec 2022

How AI Text Generation Models Are Reshaping Customer Support at Airbnb

Leveraging text generation models to build more effective, scalable customer support products.Gavin Li, Mia Zhao and Zhenyu ZhaoOne of the fastest-growing areas in modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) is AI text generation models. As the name suggests, these models generate natural language. Previously, most industrial natural language processing (NLP)...

Nov 2022

Building Airbnb Categories with ML and Human-in-the-Loop

Airbnb Categories Blog Series — Part IBy: Mihajlo Grbovic, Ying Xiao, Pratiksha Kadam, Aaron Yin, Pei Xiong, Dillon Davis, Aditya Mukherji, Kedar Bellare, Haowei Zhang, Shukun Yang, Chen Qian, Sebastien Dubois, Nate Ney, James Furnary, Mark Giangreco, Nate Rosenthal, Cole Baker, Bill Ulammandakh, Sid Reddy, Egor PakhomovFigure 1. Browsing listings by...

Nov 2022

Mussel — Airbnb’s Key-Value Store for Derived Data

Mussel — Airbnb’s Key-Value Store for Derived DataHow Airbnb built a persistent, high availability and low latency key-value storage engine for accessing derived data from offline and streaming events.By: Chandramouli Rangarajan, Shouyan Guo, Yuxi JinIntroductionWithin Airbnb, many online services need access to derived data, which is data computed...

Oct 2022

Beyond A/B test : Speeding up Airbnb Search Ranking Experimentation through Interleaving

Beyond A/B Test : Speeding up Airbnb Search Ranking Experimentation through InterleavingIntroduction of Airbnb interleaving experimentation framework, usage and approaches to address challenges in our unique businessQing Zhang, Michelle Du, Reid Andersen, Liwei HeIntroductionWhen a user searches for a place to stay on Airbnb, we aim to show them the...

Oct 2022

Upgrading Data Warehouse Infrastructure at Airbnb

This blog aims to introduce Airbnb’s experience upgrading Data Warehouse infrastructure to Spark and Iceberg.By: Ronnie Zhu, Edgar Rodriguez, Jason Xu, Gustavo Torres, Kerim Oktay, Xu ZhangIntroductionIn this blog, we will introduce our motivations for upgrading our Data Warehouse Infrastructure to Spark 3 and Iceberg. We will briefly describe the current...

Sep 2022