Facebook is developing a program that'll send a warning to parents before they upload pictures with their children on them or when the photographs are about to be available to the public eye.
This stems from Facebook's advances in artificial intelligence, which was first developed to help visually impaired users. With the company's sophisticated image recognition technology, its deep learning system will be able to analyze images and identify their subjects.
With about two billion pictures uploaded to Facebook every day, the software will be able to automatically delete "objectionable content" rather than having employees manually check and remove them.
"There's ways to keep Facebook safe, so if there's objectionable content we can find that stuff using these very intelligent systems so that we can weed out this objectionable content faster," Jay Parikh, vice president of engineering at Facebook, says at an event in Bloombury with comedian Dara O'Briain.
Parikh says that the recent developments are part of a "10-year arc of innovation."
Also, the software will allow Facebook users to sort and filter images to manage what they see on their feed. As of right now, the only ways to filter content are to block or "unfollow" friends. Of course, there's always the more extreme way of handling things: "unfriending" friends.
Parikh also elaborates that the filters can be specific. For instance, when user A wants to see user B's posts but doesn't want to see user B's constant uploads of dog photos, user A can just filter out only the dog photos.
Moving forward, the deep learning system can offer visually impaired users a better experience using a Q&A system, where they can ask Facebook to describe images.
"Imagine being visually impaired. Now all of a sudden you are able to experience these things your friends share with you, on a whole other level," Parikh says.
Parikh also exhibited Facebook's advances on virtual reality with Oculus. Interestingly, Facebook intends to "effectively build a teleporter by 2025," according to Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer.
Photo: Sam Michel | Flickr
