Facebook lends its AI powers to the OpenStreetMap community

facebook openstreetmap ai artifical intelligence map

Facebook is providing its Map With AI service to the largest open-source mapping project, OpenStreetMap.

Whereas mapping efforts from Google and Apple focus on navigating major cities, OpenStreetMap aims to ensure the smallest dirt paths are mapped.

Mapping the whole Earth is no small task: a sizeable local community helps, but it’s an impossible task manually both due to scale and often difficult to make out imagery.

In a Facebook blog post, mapping expert...

24 July 2019 | Meta (Facebook)

Facebook outage gave a glimpse at how its AI analyses images

Facebook’s issue displaying images yesterday gave users an interesting look at how the social media giant’s AI analyses their uploads.

An outage yesterday meant Facebook users were unable to see uploaded images, providing a welcome respite from the usual mix of food and baby photos. In their place, however, was some interesting text.

Text in the placeholder where the image should have been displayed showed how Facebook’s AI automatically tagged the...

4 July 2019 | Machine Learning

Facebook uses AI to counter distress caused by profiles of the deceased

Facebook wants to harness AI to prevent distressing occurrences where a deceased loved one's profile is shown as if alive on the platform.

Many of us have been there, we've logged in to Facebook to find a notification alerting us to say “Happy birthday!” to a loved one who's no longer with us. Or, sometimes, they can appear as a suggestion to invite to an event.

These are distressing moments for people, and short of ‘unfriending’ or blocking the profile they can...

10 April 2019 | Machine Learning

Facebook pumps $7.5m into an independent AI ethics centre

An independent AI ethics research centre is set to receive $7.5 million of funding courtesy of the folks at Facebook.

The new research centre is called the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence and was created in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

Facebook, like many companies, is fighting outside concerns about the development of AI and its potential societal impact. The centre should help to ensure Facebook keeps up with ethical best...

21 January 2019 | Ethics & Society

Facebook is planning on doubling its AI unit by 2020

Facebook’s plans to double its artificial intelligence unit by 2020 indicates just how important the firm considers it to be. The so-called FAIR (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research) division at the company has approximately 180-200 staff. Speaking to Forbes, Facebook Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun said he expects the division to double by 2020. Already, he admits, "I don't know everybody's name anymore and I don't recognise everybody either”. The innovative AI division at...

1 October 2018 | Meta (Facebook)

Facebook can open closed eyes in photos using AI correction

An AI-powered solution by a pair of Facebook engineers may be able to fix those photos that have been ruined by someone blinking at the wrong moment. The company published a 10-page research paper (PDF) this week detailing how their system works and likened it to existing photo retouching tools such as red-eye correction. Facebook’s idea is not entirely original, a similar feature exists in Adobe Photoshop Elements. The engineers acknowledge this in their paper but believe their ExGAN...

20 June 2018 | Meta (Facebook)