Facebook passes new milestone with its AI research

Facebook’s AI brain has become rather good at detecting breeds of dog.

Facebook may be best known for its huge social network, but the company is also conducting research in exciting computing fields, including artificial intelligence. The company has been speaking a little more about how far it has come with its machine learning research this week and is preparing to put some of its technology to work in consumer products.

Facebook’s AI Research team (FAIR) has been working to train computers to identify objects in photos, understand natural language and to be able to plan ahead. Apparently, the company’s system is 30 percent faster and uses 10 time less training data than previous industry benchmarks.

The research team has devised a range of tests to teach computers a range of skills from predictive visual learning to understanding how to play Go. All of these ideas share one key theme, object recognition. This is an area that Google has been working on intensely for some time too, but Facebook is also looking to combine the idea with other technologies, such as language understanding.

Most recently, the research team has been working on object description. Facebook’s technology can analyse and pick out objects in both the real world and from pictures, including seemingly odd things like a species of dog. Facebook looks to be integrating this into its social network to help describe images to the visually impaired. In the end, the researchers envision that this type of technology can augment our own memories and provide more useful data at our fingertips.

There are a number of interesting videos in the source link below, if you want to see the technology in action. Founder Mark Zuckerberg shared the video below, which offers a closer look at what the company is up to. Facebook will also be presenting a new paper at NIPS next month, detailing how far the company has come.

Facebook tells some of its employees to switch from iOS to Android

Let’s not beat around the bush – most social media networks have an iOS bias. Updates come out faster, features are implemented first, or their employees all prefer iOS over Android – whatever it is, the Android community is acutely aware of it. It’s also caught the attention of Facebook Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, who thinks the preference of his employees to choose iOS devices is going to hamper Facebook’s attempts to spread into emerging markets.

“I am mandating a switch of a whole bunch of my team over to Android, just because people, when left up to their own devices, will often prefer an iPhone,” said Cox yesterday at a briefing at Facebook headquarters.

Now, we could harp on about bias till the end of time, but truth be told, Cox’s decision is extremely logical for Facebook. In emerging markets, the iOS platform isn’t particularly popular due to its high price, and the only lower priced products are naturally Android. This should give Facebook a better understanding of how lower spec Android devices work (or not work) with their app. To be able to know what this feels like, Facebook is also asking its employees to take part in “2G Tuesdays” where their devices can simulate a 2G network to see just how slow devices in aforementioned emerging markets are. Hopefully this will mean more of a focus on Android and better performance for lower spec devices in the near future.

What do you think about this change at Facebook? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Source: Wired, Facebook via BGR

The post Facebook tells some of its employees to switch from iOS to Android appeared first on AndroidSPIN.

Facebook is making some of its employees ditch their iPhones for Android devices

In a recent move to help its employees better understand what Android users need, Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox is forcing an untold amount of Facebook employees to ditch their iOS devices in favor of Android. The move is being made to help Cox’s staff realize how users in emerging markets are experiencing the social networking platform.

Cox said in recent press briefing:

I am mandating a switch of a whole bunch of my team over to Android, just because people, when left up to their own devices, will often prefer an iPhone.

Facebook serves over 1.5 billion people across the globe. And while subsidized iPhones have become more and more popular in Western markets, the ability to purchase an Android device for a fraction of the cost of an iOS device is a very big selling point among users in emerging markets. Android currently holds a massive 82.8% marketshare, according to IDC.

“What we’re really trying to do is build empathy inside of the company and to really appreciate that the people we’re building for look less and less like us,” says Cox.

Earlier this week, Facebook also introduced something called “2G Tuesdays”, where, every Tuesday, Facebook employees get a notification asking if they’d like their application to behave like it was on a 2G connection. If the employees say “yes,” the app will behave like that for the next hour, allowing them to understand what folks on slower data connections experience on a daily basis.