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Facebook AI

Facebook is Using Instagram Photos and Hashtags To Improve Its Computer Vision (venturebeat.com) 45

Facebook today revealed that, using 3.5 billion publicly shared Instagram photos and their accompany hashtags, its computer system has achieved new advances, with a 85.4 percent accuracy rate when used on ImageNet, a well-known benchmark dataset. From a report: The results were shared onstage at F8, Facebook's annual developer conference taking place today at McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. Other news announced at F8 this year include the release of Oculus Go, new Facebook Stories sharing capabilities, and the reopening of app and bot reviews following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. See the full rundown here. The results of Facebook's research mean that its computer vision in the real world can see more specific subsets, so instead of just saying "food," it's Indian or Italian cuisine; not just "bird" but a cedar waxwing; not just "man in a white suit" but a clown.
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Facebook is Using Instagram Photos and Hashtags To Improve Its Computer Vision

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  • Copyright violation (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm very tempted to bring a lawsuit here. I did not grant permission for this usage.
    • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @02:25PM (#56542762)

      You know that little checkbox you have to click after reading two librairies' worth of legalese before you can use these free online services? You agreed to almost every possible usage of your data.

    • Copyright restricts nothing that is not distributed.

  • I love how every day we're getting closer and closer to having XKCD become reality! https://xkcd.com/1425/ [xkcd.com]

    • Five years until they can tell who is flipping the bird in a photo? Five years until you can tell that the tiny dark splotch behind the sun-dappled leaves is a bird? Yeah...seems optimistic to me.
  • by MagicM ( 85041 ) on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @02:24PM (#56542758)

    Facebook's current "vision" capabilities are already pretty impressive. You can right-click any image in your feed and choose "Inspect element", dig down to the element, and look at the "alt" attribute to see what Facebook thinks is in that image. A sampling of my current feed:

    Image may contain: 5 people, people smiling, people standing
    Image may contain: dog
    Image may contain: car and outdoor
    Image may contain: pizza and food
    Image may contain: text

    • by MagicM ( 85041 )
      That should say: dig down to the <img> element, and look at the "alt" attribute
    • You must be easily impressed. Any 2 year old can discern a car from a fish with 100% reliability. Computers can't.
      • by arth1 ( 260657 )

        You must be easily impressed. Any 2 year old can discern a car from a fish with 100% reliability. Computers can't.

        Given how people tag photos, I'd say that many grown-ups can't either. And I think this is the big flaw with the system; it lets just everyone tag.
        So you get dolphins tagged as "fish", raspberries tagged as "cannabis", computer cases tagged as "hard drive" and "cpu", and the flag of Ireland tagged as "Italy".
        Unless you pay good people a good salary to do a good job, you'll get crap results. Because, quite frankly, there are an awful lot of well-meaning ignoramuses out there.

    • by skids ( 119237 )

      And now apparently, they'll be able to add such informative categories as "#fml" and "#yolo"

    • I just checked a couple of pictures, and the only things it got right was that there were people in it, and outdoors. All the other stuff like count of people, what they were doing, etc. was way off.

  • It's time to mess with the Facebook algorithms, start a mass movement to apply nonsensical hashtags to every photo posted. It's like when I answer signup questions, I always choose the 1/1/1900 or 1/1/1970 depending on how permissive the signup form is, feed the beast with as much bogus data as possible so that their algorithms can't do anything useful.

    • I apply nonsensical tags to everything on facebook. At one point it would find a face when presented with a picture of a mariposa lily so I tagged it as my face. I got a bunch of friends to do the same. I wonder if it is still confused by that.
    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Add in Western spy masters, political leaders, mil and gov with whistleblowers and subversive journalists. A collage to complicate and fool collection.
  • #hotdog, #nothotdog
  • And neither have Instagram, Messenger and the rest of them. GDPR requires that the data subject gives explicit consent, separately, to each use of their data. This really powerful stuff and, at the same time, totally alien to FB, Google et al. It isn't even as if the words in the regulations are unclear or writing in high faluting legalese:

    Article 7.

    1.Where processing is based on consent, the controller shall be able to demonstrate that the data subject has consented to processing of his or her personal dat

Stellar rays prove fibbing never pays. Embezzlement is another matter.

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