Artificial intelligence is getting smarter with every passing year, and Microsoft is hoping to be on the forefront of this development. At the company's partner conference earlier today, Microsoft showed off an artificial intelligence system it has been working on, that is called Project Adam.
From what we have seen so far, Project Adam is quite impressive, as it is capable of recognizing objects and living creatures in an image. So advanced is Project Adam, it is capable of recognizing different breed of dogs, even if they have similar characteristics.
A technology such as this could be used in various situations. Imagine being out and about on a beautiful summer afternoon, only to see this magnificent bird, but not knowing what the creature is called. With Project Adam, it would be possible to take a photo of the bird and have Cortana deliver the name.
What Microsoft is doing here is in no way a new idea. Many companies have done it before, including Google with its "DistBelief" system. What sets Project Adam apart is its ability to perform tasks up to 50 times faster, and twice as accurate.
"We wanted to build a highly efficient, highly scalable distributed system from commodity PCs that has world-class training speed, scalability, and task accuracy for an important large-scale task," says Trishul Chilimbi, one of the Microsoft researchers who spearheaded the Project Adam effort.
Microsoft is able to make Project Adam this awesome by using a technique known as Deep Learning. Furthermore, since Project Adam in its current form relies heavily on images, the company had to tap in a database of over 14 million images, and 22,000 categories. This database is known as Image.Net, and it is one of the largest database of images on the web.
As time goes by, we expect Project Adam to recognize everything ranging from food telling a part different breed of ants.
At the moment, Google is ahead as its own technology is already available for use, and made available in Android and Chromebook devices. Persons can even visit Google Images to take advantage of this feature. We expect Microsoft to incorporate Project Adam into Cortana's backend, giving users a seamless experience no matter where they are.
What about Kinect 3.0
Kinect is an important hardware device to Microsoft, so it would make sense for the company to incorporate this technology into the next device. Better yet, Microsoft could make it available in the current Kinect device via a mere update.
