[LINK] More Facebook crazy - AI 'deep learning'

Jan Whitaker jwhit at janwhitaker.com
Thu Jan 30 17:49:19 AEDT 2014


  Facebook's Plan For Artificial Intelligence: Transcribe Your Calls, 
Decipher Your Photos
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/29/facebooks-plan-for-artificial-intelligence_n_4690949.html
Posted: 01/29/2014 6:56 pm EST

On Facebook's earnings call Wednesday afternoon, Mark Zuckerberg 
offered a peek at the social network's long-term plans for artificial 
intelligence. And just as we explained in November, Facebook hopes AI 
will help it more thoroughly understand the meaning of everything you 
share, from gauging your mood by the words in your status update, to 
picking out a Coke can in your photos.

Facebook has been working to expand its artificial intelligence 
research lab, and last month appointed a renowned researcher with 
expertise in deep learning to oversee it. Deep learning is a 
sub-field within AI that focuses on training computers to make sense 
of the many messy, undefined and irregular types of data we humans 
generate, such as when we speak, write, photograph or film. (Teaching 
a computer to recognize a cat, for example, turns out to be an 
extremely difficult problem.)

So what would Facebook do with deep learning capabilities? Get to 
know you much, much better by more effectively analyzing every item 
you share, according to Zuckerberg's clues.

"The goal really is just to try to understand how everything on 
Facebook is connected by understanding what the posts that people 
write mean and the content that's in the photos and videos that 
people are sharing," Zuckerberg explained to analysts and investors 
on the call. "The real value will be if we can understand the meaning 
of all the content that people are sharing, we can provide much more 
relevant experiences in everything we do."

Let's try to unpack some of those generalities. In a sense, you can 
imagine a deep learning-enhanced Facebook as a jealous ex who stalks 
and overanalyzes your every online move. Instead of merely knowing 
you'd shared a photo, Facebook might be able to figure out that the 
snapshot showed a beach, along with a picture of your ex-boyfriend 
and that you two were smiling. When, a few days later, you post a 
status update, Facebook could perhaps analyze your phrasing to guess 
that you're lonely and depressed. And before long, you might be 
seeing ads for dating sites, antidepressants and funny films.

Zuckerberg also mentioned that AI could be used to transcribe the 
voice clips people share in Messenger, so people could receive them 
more easily.

He acknowledged that these are "pretty big tasks in AI" that 
Facebook's teams are working on, and noted it could be years before 
they're fully formed. Within the next three years, Facebook will be 
focused on "building new experiences for sharing," Zuckerberg said. 
Five years from now, he predicted, we should see Facebook's AI work 
reshaping our experience.


Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how 
do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.
~Margaret Atwood, writer

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