What You Should Know About Facebook's A.I.

Machine learning has already taken control of your News Feed and identifiesyour friends. This is what's next.

 

Behind the curtain, Facebook is aggressively but quite tacitly pursuing a list of aloof projects: providing Internet to the developing parts of the world via drones; indulgingpeople with virtual reality. And now there's artificial intelligence.

 

Have you seen the “See Translation’ button on Facebook, or have been barraged with a list of names of friends as suggestions to tag? If the answer to this is yes, then congratulations you’re interaction with Facebook's AI was successful. This is not it, there’s much more mind-blowing stuff to arrive. According to Popular Science the company's somewhat new Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research team, known as FAIR, is working making computers think like humans, unlike linear machines. This means, FAIR ismaking machines understand, learn and imitate the actions of Facebook users. The ultimate goal is to make Facebook and its future technologies - intuitive, and human-like.

 

Refining the useful tools.

Facebook's AI team has a slew of courageous missions that might be possible in the far-off future. This doesn't mean you haven’t been interacting with few of its accessible AI projects, for example, language translation.

The software created by FAIR is deployed by a separate arm called Language Technology within Facebook. It has developed around 493 translation directions – which means, it can translate English to German, and German to English, and each action counts as one direction. What's impressive about this is that Facebook’s AI can understand semantics, which includes Internet slang. However, the real challenge not realizing when an idiom doesn’t apply to a particular situation. From Popular Science:

The AI is adaptive by nature, and can be trained on slang quickly. The Language Technology team recently learned that French soccer fans were using a new form of slang to say “wow,” and after training the neural network on that public data, it can now reliably translate that text. They're working now to grow Facebook’s lexicon by training on new data every day, but all languages are now updated monthly.

Creating a smarter digital assistant.

 

Facebook has been pumping money heavily into its own version of Siri, ‘M’. ‘M’ has been launched to just a few hundred users in Bay Area, and is touted as a more competent version of Microsoft Cortana and Google Now. Facebook’s M is able to, book a flight and inform an airline that you'll be carrying an infant with you. Also, it can buy birthday gifts after making recommendations.

 

“We start capturing all of your intent for the things you want to do. Intent often leads to buying something, or to a transaction, and that’s an opportunity for us to [make money] over time,” David Marcus, vice president of messaging products at Facebook, told Wired.

 

If machines become capable of tracking users' intent over time, which could easily be termed as invasive. Facebook might set its new technology in motion pronto, which definitely is not music to the ears of privacy advocates.

“If we have an idea that actually works, within a month it can be in front of 1.5 billion people,” said Yann LeCun, Director of AI Research at Facebook. “Let’s keep our eyes focused on the horizon, where our long-term goal is, but on the way there are a lot of things that we’re going to build that are going to have applications in the short term.”

Benefits for the Internet

While deploying AI at rapid speed may act as a troubling factor to a few, there are some good and simple things Facebook is doing for us too.

Like, launching smart video identification. Many of the videos floating on Facebook lack descriptive text or metadata. So, if these videos are accidently deleted, they can never be retrieved. Rob Fergus, who leads the AI research team focused on vision, told Popular Science, that "AI would 'watch' the video, and be able to classify video arbitrarily”.

 

Not only can the technology identify what is going on in the video, but it can also stop copyrighted content or pornographic video from spreading.

What is the next goal for FAIR? If they can make Facebook smarter, they definitely can make the Internet smarter too.

Here’s why IBM wants to become a weather forecaster!

The reason behind IBM wanting to acquire The WeatherCompany can be summed up in this – Weather affects everything!

According to sources, the Big Blue has allegedly invested over $2 billion towards buying the data and digital assets of The Weather Company, also known to own the Weather Channel and Weather.com.

This might seem like an odd pairing, but the Weather Company has already made up its mind to sell all its weather data services, which will be channelled to the cloud-based Watson. IBM will have the ability to take full advantage of this partnership by controlling the app that is installed in millions of smart phones. This adds more hats to IBM’s wears.

According to New York Times, the Weather Company’s data impacts everything, ranging from retailers and insurance companies to the aerospace sector. This exchange could help develop new use cases for Watson.

The in-house forecasting team, WSI, can be the main areas of interest for IBM. The team creates complex projections based on the climate data sets for government and corporate giants. WSI could offer a whole new market for Watson-related solutions and help boost IBM’s analytical initiatives.

All in all, this partnership means more power to IBM!

Airspace apps let your hands control the action

Are you a trekkie? If the answer to this question is yes, then you ought to have Airspace apps.  

No, this is not a Steven Spielberg creation, but has been inspired by the technology flaunted in the film Minority Report (by Spielberg). The intangible glass screens and the hyped up hand movements were a rage in 2002, courtesy to Tom Cruise. Now, you can experience every sci-fi fantasy first-hand. So, oh captain my captain, hop to your desktop to download the Airspace app store.

A huge leap into the abyss:

How cool would it be if your desk got transformed into a Starship deck? Admit it! It feels awesome that finally your daydreams have come true.

Touch-screens have become passé, what remains is a void. This void is transformable and….wait for it…there it is transformed! In the blink of an eye.

San Francisco based company, Leap Motion have pioneered the new-wave mechanism of motion recognition.  They have unveiled a new discipline that was far from reality. The company has modelled flexible hand gestures to be accustomed with regular computing chores. Michael Zagorsek, Vice president of product marketing for Leap Motion stated that they wanted to bring the dead space alive in between the computer and the mouse.

The functioning:

How did Leap manage to achieve gesture controlled screens? Not with a genie of course, well, Leap developed a pocket-sized motion controller. The device is ensconced with sensors that map your hand movement hereby propagating a mind-blowing gaming experience. The sensors translate and relay every gesture to the apps.

Earlier, only a giant like Apple had managed to create first-rate gizmos. Leap has attempted to play it safe. The launch video received an overwhelming response, with more than 9 million hits. Whether Airspace apps will agree with the masses, let the experts do the math.

Work still in progress:

The Xbox Kinect was a first of its kind and still remains the consumer’s ‘precious’. It was designed for a larger screen and provided movement flexibility.

The Airspace app store has its own advantages but cannot be coined as the beggar’s choice. Every gadget needed a marvel to turn the tide, for example, Xbox needed Halo, iPhone needed Angry Birds, CNN needed the Gulf war and BBC needed Sherlock. Similarly, Leap is awaiting its milepost in the making. 

Leap may have taken the gaming experience to a whole new level. But what’s in store for the whole web experience? As and when the day comes, it will trigger the rebirth of social media. As the wise man said ‘New is always better’ you guessed it right, until then suit up and stay tuned.