Microsoft is developing an artificial intelligence (AI) system called "Project Adam" that can perform visual recognition tasks faster than any other system currently available.
Microsoft Research, a research division of the company, says that Project Adam enhances the learning ability of computers. With Project Adam computer systems can absorb data and teach themselves.
The company demonstrated Project Adam at its Faculty Summit in Redmond. As part of the demonstration, the company brought dogs of different breeds and showed how technology can distinguish between them in real time.
Project Adam can be very important for the company as several technology companies are working hard to develop AI and predictive systems that can be useful in the mobile technologies. Previously, Google was said to be using a network of around 16,000 computers to teach itself to identify pictures of cats.
Amazon's Firefly technology, which debuted in the Fire Phone, is also an effort by the company in the visual search field.
Microsoft claims that practically, Project Adam is around 50 times faster and more accurate than in theory. It is more efficient and uses around 30 times lesser machines when compared to Google's efforts.
"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, a Microsoft researcher working on Project Adam.
Chilimbi explains that the system's neurons observe small portions of a picture and does not examine the entire thing, which allows the system to understand details such as facial recognition, textures and more.
The Microsoft team is also working towards speech and text recognition, which may actually create a high-tech personal assistant.
"We said, 'OK, if we have a really scalable system, let's prove it works.' The challenge was: Can we do really well with this large-scale system to train large models on this large data set? And the answer was: Yes, we could. Our system is general-purpose and supports training a wide variety of deep-neural-network [DNN] architectures," added Chilimbi.
Microsoft has not confirmed if the research of Project Adam will be commercially available. However, market observers believe that Project Adam may have implications for Microsoft Bing, a web search engine. Project Adam may also have possible implications on Cortana, a fictional AI character in Halo series of video games.
