Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg just posted a beautiful story on his company’s research on an Artificial Intelligence tool which helps blind people “see” photos. The feature describes photos posted on the social network to blind users.
According to Mark,
Our AI can now look at a photo, figure out what’s in it and help explain it to you. This is especially helpful if you’re blind or can’t see the photo.
We see AI as helping computers better understand the world — so they can be more helpful to people
Wired writes that Facebook’s photo-reading system is based on what’s called deep learning, a technique the company has long used to identify faces and objects in photos posted to its social network.
Using vast neural networks—interconnected machines that approximate the web of neurons in the human brain—the company can teach its services to identify photos by analyzing enormous numbers of similar images. To identify your face, for instance, it feeds all known pictures of you into the neural network, and over time, the system develops a pretty good idea of what you look like. This is how Facebook seems to recognize you and your friends when you upload a photo and start adding tags.
Facebook is still early with this technology; however you can already start to imagine how helpful it will be in the future.
