Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Facebook is using A.I. to create the world’s most detailed population maps

By

It’s probably fair to say that Facebook hasn’t had a banner year when it comes to good publicity. What just a few years ago seemed like a benevolent and cool tech giant is often now cast in a negative light, largely due to the lingering effects of controversies like the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But Facebook is working hard to show that that its expertise in A.I. has a valuable role to play as a force for good in the world.

With that in mind, A.I. experts and data scientists at Facebook have today shown off the world’s most accurate population density maps yet created. Building on work that dates back to 2016, the company has unveiled maps covering the majority of the African continent. Eventually, it says that this will expand to map nearly the whole world’s population. This will allow humanitarian agencies to determine how populations are distributed even in remote areas; opening up new opportunities for healthcare and relief workers to be able to distribute aid where necessary.

“[Our population density maps] are 3x more detailed than any other population map available,” James Gill, a software engineer at Facebook, told Digital Trends. “On the technology side, we have to address data infrastructure on a massive scale, developing spatial algorithms that work with interesting computation graph topologies, novel labeling techniques, and apply state-of-the-art research in machine learning … On the impact side, our work informs life-saving service delivery like vaccination delivery and natural disaster response. So it’s very exciting both from a technical perspective, as well as from an impact perspective.”

Related

Facebook stressed that no Facebook user data has been, or will be, used in the project. The population maps are instead based on census and satellite data, which contain no personally identifiable information. To create its dwelling-spotting A.I., the company built a tool that can take extremely high-resolution satellite data (50 cm of land per pixel) and then cross-reference it with census data to build up an accurate picture of how many people live in an area. While this could be done manually using satellite images, it would be incredibly time-consuming and tedious. Facebook’s algorithms can achieve the same thing with an accuracy level of 99.6 percent.

The results are interesting from a computer science perspective. From a human perspective, however, they could be life-saving in a humanitarian situation. See, this is kind the of Facebook we want to see more of!

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Luke Dormehl
Luke Dormehl
Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
A.I. teaching assistants could help fill the gaps created by virtual classrooms
AI in education kid with robot

There didn’t seem to be anything strange about the new teaching assistant, Jill Watson, who messaged students about assignments and due dates in professor Ashok Goel’s artificial intelligence class at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her responses were brief but informative, and it wasn’t until the semester ended that the students learned Jill wasn’t actually a “she” at all, let alone a human being. Jill was a chatbot, built by Goel to help lighten the load on his eight other human TAs.

"We thought that if an A.I. TA would automatically answer routine questions that typically have crisp answers, then the (human) teaching staff could engage the students on the more open-ended questions," Goel told Digital Trends. "It is only later that we became motivated by the goal of building human-like A.I. TAs so that the students cannot easily tell the difference between human and A.I. TAs. Now we are interested in building A.I. TAs that enhance student engagement, retention, performance, and learning."

Read more
This basic human skill is the next major milestone for A.I.
Profile of head on computer chip artificial intelligence.

Remember the amazing, revelatory feeling when you first discovered the existence of cause and effect? That’s a trick question. Kids start learning the principle of causality from as early as eight months old, helping them to make rudimentary inferences about the world around them. But most of us don’t remember much before the age of around three or four, so the important lesson of “why” is something we simply take for granted.

It’s not only a crucial lesson for humans to learn, but also one that today’s artificial intelligence systems are pretty darn bad at. While modern A.I. is capable of beating human players at Go and driving cars on busy streets, this is not necessarily comparable with the kind of intelligence humans might use to master these abilities. That’s because humans -- even small infants -- possess the ability to generalize by applying knowledge from one domain to another. For A.I. to live up to its potential, this is something it also needs to be able to do.

Read more
GTC 2020 roundup: Nvidia’s virtual world for robots, A.I. video calls
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang with a few Nvidia graphics cards.

"The age of A.I. has begun," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared at this year's GTC. At its GPU Technology Conference this year, Nvidia showcased its innovation to further A.I., noting how the technology could help solve the world's problems 10 times better and faster.

While Nvidia is most well-known for its graphics cards -- and more recently associated with real-time ray tracing -- the company is also driving the behind-the-scenes innovation that brings artificial intelligence into our daily lives, from warehouse robots that pack our shipping orders, to self-driving cars and natural language bots that deliver news, search, and information with little latency or delay.

Read more