When Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) suggests you "tag" a friend in a photo, it generally suggests that friend's name.  That small interaction provides a glimpse into the world of an emerging and powerful aspect of artificial intelligence (AI) in action -- image recognition. With its treasure trove of words and pictures from 1.79 billion monthly active users, it is using that data, combined with recent advancements in AI, to propel this and other technological advances. Â
Facebook may well have the lead in facial recognition, even extending a step further into the realm of facial verification. It released a research paper in 2014 in which it reported 97.35% accuracy, which approaches human levels of recognition. So accurate, in fact, that Facebook removed the feature for European Union citizens at the EU's request to protect privacy.
So what is the science behind these developments? Deep learning, a discipline of artificial intelligence, creates a computer model of the human brain that is combined with powerful algorithms and fed massive amounts of data. It is "taught" to recognize similarities as well as distinguish and differentiate. Simply put, it learns to recognize patterns across large swaths of data. This has led to dramatic advances in the areas of voice recognition, image recognition, natural language processing, and user profiling.
Facebook believes this science is so important, it went so far as to create a series of educational videos on the subject. These detail and define what AI is, how it works, the different methods it employs, and what it hopes to achieve. You can watch them here.
Facebook is pursuing numerous initiatives rooted in deep learning to better connect with its users. Visual understanding, more advanced than image recognition, seeks to not only identify the people in a photo or video but also understand what those people are doing, as well as identify surrounding objects.
