And social media is at the very forefront of applying the technology. This opens up an entirely new realm of data to mine for insights.
Now, photos can be analyzed by ‘robot algorithms’ to give them structure - what’s in it, what color is it, where was it taken, who is in it, are the people pulling a happy or sad face, etc. In any given photo, for example, the computer doesn’t have a reference for who is in it, where it was taken, what time of day, etc. This is an accomplishment because photos and videos, which were once considered ‘completely unstructured’ data. Only with the advent of machine learning algorithms has this kind of analysis been possible.Īlgorithms are becoming increasingly intelligent and able to help us understand what or who (in Facebook’s case) is in a photo or video. (Like that old Sesame Street bit: “One of these things is not like the others…”)īut for a computer, that’s a relatively new accomplishment. Show a set of photos of lamps to any three-year-old child, and she can pick out the ones that are similar.
In both cases, the technology represents yet another step forward in treating photos as quantifiable data. A recent update to the Photos app included with the Mac OS offers a smart album called “selfies” that - you guessed it - picks out all the photos it believes you’ve taken of yourself. But Facebook isn’t the only one putting the new algorithms to work. Users can opt out of facial recognition, and users must opt in to the new Photo Magic feature to get notifications about images they may want to share. Facebook says it is solving a problem of the digital age: that you may have dozens of photos of friends on your phone that you never get around to sharing.įacebook’s powerful facial recognition algorithm hopes to make that a problem of the past by recognizing your friends and prompting you to share the photos.
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