We all have seen Facebook grow. It seems like yesterday that many of us were introduced to this new social network with a naive impression of sharing pictures with friends and family. Today, the platform is considerably more robust and continually unfolds new features over basic networking with old friends. Facebook is building a business with long-term prospects where the role of Facebook Artificial Intelligence is unfathomable. Better yet, it is crucial.
Facebook is building its business at high speed by learning about its users and packaging their data for the benefit of advertisers. The company functions around the goal of connecting every person on the planet through facebook-owned tech products and services (such as Whatsapp, Instagram, Oculus and more) within 100 years. To crush that iceberg, AI is the way.
Facebook has evolved as a platform enabling conversation and communication between people as a highly valuable source of knowing their lifestyle, interests, behavior patterns and taste inside and out. What do individual users like? What don’t they like? This data -- voluntarily provide but messily structured -- can be utilized for profit at an exorbitant value.
That’s where AI comes in. AI enables machines to learn to clarify data, all by themselves. The simplest example of this would be AI image analysis identifying a dog, without telling that machine what a dog looks like. This begins to give structure to unstructured data. It quantifies it and reprints it in the form from which understandable insights can then be generated.
And that’s just the beginning. There are many use cases of how Facebook is revolutionizing its business through the use of Artificial Intelligence.
Analyzing Text
Believe it or not, a large amount of data shared on Facebook is still text. Videos are all the rage considering the high engagement and larger data volume in terms of megabytes, but text provides better value. After all, a written explanation is always better than even a good video or image representing the same.
A brilliant tool used by Facebook is called Deeptext, which deciphers the meaning of the content posted to find the relative meaning. Facebook then generates leads with this tool by directing people to advertisers based on the conversations they are having. It offers the user related shopping links to connect chats and posts to potential interests.
Mapping Population Density
Through the use of AI, Facebook is now working to map the world’s population density. The company revealed some details about this immersive technology back in 2016 when it created maps for 22 nations. Today, Facebook’s maps cover the majority of Africa and it won’t be long before the whole world’s population is mapped. With the help of satellite imagery and AI, this tedious task is getting completed. As per Facebook’s latest reveal — their all-new machine learning systems are faster and more efficient than originally released in 2016.
Rigorous evolution has made this possible — through on-the-ground and high-resolution satellite imagery. Facebook’s in-house teams and third-party partners have intensified their efforts in making it an unprecedented job. This is revolutionary work, but more than that it will have humanitarian benefits and applications. The data will be of humongous help for disaster relief and vaccination schemes.
Easy Translation
From an endless number of people operating Facebook all over the world, language has always been a barrier. This is simplified by Facebook Artificial Intelligence-based automatic translation system. The Applied Machine Learning team helps 800 million people every month find preferred translated posts in their news feed. Since Facebook is all about human interactions, people fill their feeds with expressions and emotion. Hence, translation is crucial to social interactions on the site.
Chatbots
From automated subscription content like weather and traffic to customized communication like receipts, shipping notifications and live automated messages, using the site has become easier and more efficient with chatbots at our service. Facebook has a powerful and highly functional bot API for the Messenger platform that does three functions smoothly
- Send/receive API. This API is all about sending and receiving text, images and rich bubbles comprised of multiple calls-to-action. A welcome screen for threads can also be created.
- Message template. Facebook offers developers pre-made message templates which allow customers to tap buttons and see beautiful, template images. This is much easier than having to code a new programming language for bot interaction. Structured messages with call-to-actions are amazingly user-friendly.
- Welcome screen. Offering a tool to customize your experience, the Messenger app is all about better communication and retrieving the result as needed. And the welcome screen initiates this journey. Here people discover chatbots features and initiate the conversation.
Caffe2go
Another feature utilizing artificial intelligence on Facebook is Caffe2go, which enables the Facebook app to transform video -- not just photos -- using machine learning in real time by adding artsy touches -- on your phone! Similar to Prisma, the feature is great for recording live videos and transforming it with creative effects that historically required sending video to a data center for processing. Caffe2go works offline and renders live. This technique is literally AI in the palm of your hands and provides everyone with state-of-the-art creative tools for expressing their creativity freely and in a flash.
Posted by Facebook Engineering on Monday, November 7, 2016
Preventing Suicide
Around the world, suicide is the second leading cause of death for 15 to 29-year olds. Thankfully, Facebook can now help prevent suicides through the use of AI. AI can signal posts of people who might be in need and/or perhaps driven by suicidal tendencies. The AI uses machine learning to flag key phrases in posts and concerned comments from friends or family members to help identify users who may be at risk. Analyzing human nuance as a whole is quite complex, but AI is able to track it the context and understand what is a suicidal pattern and what isn’t. It’s great to see that Facebook and other social media sites are doing their part to help with this issue.
Detecting Bad Content
The thorniest social media issues are always related to security and privacy. In addition to the already discussed, Facebook is using AI to detect content falling into seven main categories: nudity, graphic violence, terrorism, hate speech, spam, fake account and suicide prevention. AI helps identify fake accounts created for malicious purposes and shuts them down instantly.
Hate speech is tricky stuff. Requiring the combined efforts of AI and the company’s community standards team, it is a tough nut to crack. It's always difficult to track whether hate speech is actually there or if there is a nuance to be considered. That’s why the current scenario involves both AI automatically flagging potential hate speech along with follow-up manual review. In other areas, Facebook’s AI system relies on computer vision and raises a degree of confidence in order to determine whether or not to remove the content.
Summary
In a nutshell, AI is here to stay and is surely going to make a drastic impact in the way Facebook serves both users and advertisers. Although it has always remained tight-lipped about future inventions, Facebook is always utilizing technology to offer new features and services each year. With so many AI-based initiatives onboard, Facebook is able to handle new challenges and explore new paths. After all, innovation has no end.
What to learn more about AI and how to help businesses integrate it into their service offerings? Then join the Vietnam AI Grand Challenge, a series of hackathons focused on Artificial Intelligence with the goal of building the Ultimate AI Virtual Assistant. The series is organized by Kambria with the support of the Vietnam Ministry of Science & Technology and the Ministry of Planning & Investment.
Participants will be guided and trained in AI technology through a series of educational workshops and will have the opportunity to work with leading AI experts in Vietnam and Silicon Valley. Winners will also have a chance to develop their project in a one-month incubation program before competing in Grand Finale in August.
✨ Hackathon Registration — deadline is June 16th: https://bounty.kambria.io/
✨ Join the discussion group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/VietnamAIGC
✨ Latest updates and events: https://www.facebook.com/VietnamAIGC
✨ More information: https://www.aigrandchallenge.com
