While uploading photos to Facebook, you may notice that the social network will try to automatically tag faces and match them with their respective profiles.
Facebook's artificial intelligence chief, Yann LeCun, thinks the company's facial recognition is the best in the world, according to an interview with Popular Science. And the next step for Facebook's AI efforts are recognizing what's in the videos you watch.
While speaking at the 2015 Dublin Web Summit , Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said that while the amount of content Facebook considers showing in your News Feed grows every year, the company's algorithms have to be more selective to surface what you actually care about.
"We need systems that can help us understand the world and help us filter it better," Schroepfer said during the press event, according to Business Insider.
To get better at filtering video — Facebook said it expects to account for the majority of content shared on its network in a few years — the company plans to use AI to scan the contents of videos like it already does for photos.
Popular Science recently talked to Rob Fergus, who leads the AI research team at Facebook, about the new frontier of using AI to scan video:
"Lots of video is “lost” in the noise because of a lack of metadata, or it’s not accompanied by any descriptive text. AI would “watch” the video, and be able to classify video arbitrarily.
This has major implications for stopping content Facebook doesn’t want from getting onto their servers—like pornography, copyrighted content, or anything else that violates their terms of service. It also could identify news events, and curate different types of video category. Facebook has traditionally farmed these tasks out to contracted companies, so this could potentially play a role in mitigating costs.
In current tests, the AI shows promise. When shown a video of sports being played, like hockey, basketball or table tennis, it can correctly identify the sport. It can tell baseball from softball, rafting from kayaking, and basketball from street ball."
Make sure to read the full story at Popular Science for more details.
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