AI, Facebook"s Leap Into The Future

Science Jeanette Walsh
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These days, computers are getting smarter through an artificial intelligence program some call deep learning.

Some can now tell the difference between a dog and a cat! But…

Facebook has its own AI research lab called “FAIR” in which technicians hope to move away from what they call parlor tricks toward a much more useful and extensive digital future.

Research scientist Piotr Dollar at FAIR tells us that the first step is to help a machine go beyond simply recognizing the image in a photo and distinguish each detail and understand its relationship to everything else in the photo. Mr. Dollar’s team now boasts of having developed a set of tools that is capable of installing that technology into a computer.

Facebook hopes to use these tools to provide the building blocks necessary to create more sophisticated vision systems. One useful feature would be to offer software that may clearly describe a photo to a blind user. The company claims to have made deep inroads in that direction.

In addition, and another intriguing step forward will be the use of these tools to create more realistic systems that display real world images with the highest precision possible.

This development isn’t just for FB alone. The company plans to offer these tools in open source to the general public. In this way, every developer in the world may experiment with the code and use it as they see fit as well as make improvements that will advance the entire system.

These tools at FAIR aren’t the first software tools leading to the new computer vision. Microsoft’s Kinect can follow the motion of your hands or face, and the self-driving cars are able to monitor the location of nearby pedestrians and other cars around the vehicle. But, Mr. Dollar explains, those rely on depth sensors to isolate images.

Facebook’s FAIR AI software, rather than enclose the image in a “box”, will work as well with two-dimensional images, creating more accurate pictures.

Mr. Dollar goes on to say that not only Facebook, but many other companies such as Microsoft and Google, have been very open about sharing technology, including AI projects, but most of the software developed has been for their own internal use.

FAIR, however, continues with research that may never even be used by FB. The company claims simply to want to help advance AI in any way possible, not simply for the benefit of FB alone, but for everyone.

While this may sound overly altruistic, FB hopes to benefit as well. Mr. Dollar states that FB’s ultimate goal is — in the end — the hope of using at least a few of these ideas for itself.