NEW YORK: The world’s biggest social networking website, Facebook, is going to solve users’ biggest problem of choosing what they should and shouldn’t upload on the social network as it is developing artificial intelligence software that will help the users decide.
The software could even warn users if someone else uploads a snap of them, Facebook has revealed. It hopes the software will ‘mediate’ users interactions with their friends.
‘Imagine that you had an intelligent digital assistant which would mediate your interaction with your friends and also with content on Facebook,’ said the head of the Facebook AI lab, Yann LeCun.
His project hopes to analyse everything uploaded to the social network, from video to pictures. ‘You need a machine to really understand content and understand people and be able to hold all that data,’ he says. ‘That is an AI-complete problem.’
He also envisions a Facebook that instantly notifies you when someone you don’t know posts your photo to the social network without your approval. ‘You will have a single point of contact to mediate your interaction but also to protect your private information,’ he says.
LeCun also revealed this team has discussed the project with Oculus, the Virtual Reality headset firm recently acquired by facebook, and was also thinking about working with robotics fimrs in the future.
His team has been working on the project since 2013, when the social networking giant has teamed up with New York University to set up a research lab designed to learn about artificial intelligence.
This could include things like ranking (the items in) news feeds, or determining the ads that are shown to users, to be more relevant,’ LeCun said when the project was first announced.
‘Then there are things that are less directly connected, like analyzing content, understanding natural language and being able to model users… to allow them to learn new things, entertain them and help them achieve their goals.’
LeCun said the new artificial intelligence lab would be the largest research facility of its kind in the world, though he declined to provide numbers. ‘We’re limited only by how many smart people there are in the world that we can hire,’ the French-born mathematician and computer scientist said.
The lab is be based in three locations – New York, London and Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. LeCun, the founding director of NYU’s Center for Data Science, is known for creating an early version of a pattern-recognition algorithm that mimics in part the visual cortex of animals and humans.
LeCun’s recent research projects include the application of ‘deep learning’ methods for visual scene understanding, driverless cars and small flying robots, as well as speech recognition, and applications in biology and medicine.
