How Facebook Uses Artificial Intelligence

JUNE 5, 2019
HTTPS://KAMBRIA.IO/BLOG/HOW-FACEBOOK-USES-ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE/

We all have seen Facebook grow. It seems like yesterday that many of us were introduced
to this new social network with a naive impression of sharing pictures with friends and
family. Today, the platform is considerably more robust and continually unfolds new
features over basic networking with old friends. Facebook is building a business with
long-term prospects where the role of Facebook Artificial Intelligence is unfathomable.
Better yet, it is crucial.
Facebook is building its business at high speed by learning about its users and packaging
their data for the benefit of advertisers. The company functions around the goal of
connecting every person on the planet through facebook-owned tech products and
services (such as Whatsapp, Instagram, Oculus and more) within 100 years. To crush
that iceberg, AI is the way.
Facebook has evolved as a platform enabling conversation and communication between
people as a highly valuable source of knowing their lifestyle, interests, behavior patterns
and taste inside and out. What do individual users like? What don’t they like? This data
— voluntarily provide but messily structured — can be utilized for profit at an exorbitant
value.
That’s where AI comes in. AI enables machines to learn to clarify data, all by themselves.
The simplest example of this would be AI image analysis identifying a dog, without telling
that machine what a dog looks like. This begins to give structure to unstructured data. It
quantifies it and reprints it in the form from which understandable insights can then be
generated.
And that’s just the beginning. There are many use cases of how Facebook is
revolutionizing its business through the use of Artificial Intelligence.
Analyzing Text
Believe it or not, a large amount of data shared on Facebook is still text. Videos are all the
rage considering the high engagement and larger data volume in terms of megabytes, but
text provides better value. After all, a written explanation is always better than even a
good video or image representing the same.
A brilliant tool used by Facebook is called Deeptext, which deciphers the meaning of the
content posted to find the relative meaning. Facebook then generates leads with this tool
by directing people to advertisers based on the conversations they are having. It offers
the user related shopping links to connect chats and posts to potential interests.
Mapping Population Density
Through the use of AI, Facebook is now working to map the world’s population density.
The company revealed some details about this immersive technology back in 2016 when
it created maps for 22 nations. Today, Facebook’s maps cover the majority of Africa and
it won’t be long before the whole world’s population is mapped. With the help of satellite
imagery and AI, this tedious task is getting completed. As per Facebook’s latest reveal —
their all-new machine learning systems are faster and more efficient than originally
released in 2016.
Rigorous evolution has made this possible — through on-the-ground and high-resolution
satellite imagery. Facebook’s in-house teams and third-party partners have intensified
their efforts in making it an unprecedented job. This is revolutionary work, but more than
that it will have humanitarian benefits and applications. The data will be of humongous
help for disaster relief and vaccination schemes.
Easy Translation
From an endless number of people operating Facebook all over the world, language has
always been a barrier. This is simplified by Facebook Artificial Intelligence-based
automatic translation system. The Applied Machine Learning team helps 800 million
people every month find preferred translated posts in their news feed. Since Facebook is
all about human interactions, people fill their feeds with expressions and emotion. Hence,
translation is crucial to social interactions on the site.
Chatbots
From automated subscription content like weather and traffic to customized
communication like receipts, shipping notifications and live automated messages, using
the site has become easier and more efficient with chatbots at our service. Facebook has
a powerful and highly functional bot API for the Messenger platform that does three
functions smoothly
• Send/receive API. This API is all about sending and receiving text, images
and rich bubbles comprised of multiple calls-to-action. A welcome screen for
threads can also be created.
• Message template. Facebook offers developers pre-made message
templates which allow customers to tap buttons and see beautiful, template
images. This is much easier than having to code a new programming
language for bot interaction. Structured messages with call-to-actions are
amazingly user-friendly.
• Welcome screen. Offering a tool to customize your experience, the
Messenger app is all about better communication and retrieving the result as
needed. And the welcome screen initiates this journey. Here people discover
chatbots features and initiate the conversation.
Caffe2go
Another feature utilizing artificial intelligence on Facebook is Caffe2go, which enables the
Facebook app to transform video — not just photos — using machine learning in real
time by adding artsy touches — on your phone! Similar to Prisma, the feature is great for
recording live videos and transforming it with creative effects that historically required
sending video to a data center for processing. Caffe2go works offline and renders live.
This technique is literally AI in the palm of your hands and provides everyone with state-
of-the-art creative tools for expressing their creativity freely and in a flash.

Preventing Suicide
Around the world, suicide is the second leading cause of death for 15 to 29-year olds.
Thankfully, Facebook can now help prevent suicides through the use of AI. AI can signal
posts of people who might be in need and/or perhaps driven by suicidal tendencies. The
AI uses machine learning to flag key phrases in posts and concerned comments from
friends or family members to help identify users who may be at risk. Analyzing human
nuance as a whole is quite complex, but AI is able to track it the context and understand
what is a suicidal pattern and what isn’t. It’s great to see that Facebook and other social
media sites are doing their part to help with this issue.
Detecting Bad Content
The thorniest social media issues are always related to security and privacy. In addition
to the already discussed, Facebook is using AI to detect content falling into seven main
categories: nudity, graphic violence, terrorism, hate speech, spam, fake account and
suicide prevention. AI helps identify fake accounts created for malicious purposes and
shuts them down instantly.
Hate speech is tricky stuff. Requiring the combined efforts of AI and the company’s
community standards team, it is a tough nut to crack. It’s always difficult to track whether
hate speech is actually there or if there is a nuance to be considered. That’s why the
current scenario involves both AI automatically flagging potential hate speech along with
follow-up manual review. In other areas, Facebook’s AI system relies on computer vision
and raises a degree of confidence in order to determine whether or not to remove the
content.

Summary
In a nutshell, AI is here to stay and is surely going to make a drastic impact in the way
Facebook serves both users and advertisers. Although it has always remained tight-
lipped about future inventions, Facebook is always utilizing technology to offer new
features and services each year. With so many AI-based initiatives onboard, Facebook is
able to handle new challenges and explore new paths. After all, innovation has no end.
Dec 29, 2016,01:01am EST

4 Mind-Blowing Ways Facebook Uses Artificial Intelligence

Bernard Marr
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2016/12/29/4-amazing-ways-facebook-uses-deep-
learning-to-learn-everything-about-you/?sh=19ed7141ccbf

Facebook builds its business by learning about its users and packaging their data for
advertisers. It then reinvests this money into offering us new, useful functionality –
currently video and shopping - which it also uses to learn even more about us.

As the way it enables communication and conversation between people has proven to
be hugely valuable to us, it has become a magnet for a huge amount of data about us –
who we are, where we spend our time and what we like. The problem for Facebook’s
data scientists who have to try to make sense of this is that much of this data is very
messily unstructured.

With 1.2 billion people uploading 136,000 photos and updating their status 293,000
times per minute, until recently Facebook could only hope to draw value from a tiny
fraction of its unstructured data – information which isn’t easily quantified and put
into rows and tables for computer analysis.

Deep Learning is helping to play a part in changing that. Deep Learning techniques
enables machines to learn to classify data by themselves. A simple example is a deep
learning image analysis tool which would learn to recognize images which contain cats,
without specifically being told what a cat looks like. By analyzing a large number of
images, it can learn from the context of the image – what else is likely to be present in
an image of a cat? What text or metadata might suggest that an image contains a cat?

This helps it to give structure to unstructured data, by quantifying it and representing

it in a form from which analytical tools can derive insights. They try to answer
questions such as -how often does a company’s products appear in pictures which also
contain cats? Should we focus on displaying our ads to people who like cats, or not?

That’s the basic principle of why Deep Learning (DL) is useful to Facebook, and as DL
algorithms become more sophisticated they can increasingly be applied to more data
that we share, from text to pictures to videos.

So here’s a couple of specific use cases where DL is used to gain value and help
Facebook achieve its goals of providing greater convenience to users, and enabling
them to learn more about us.

1. Textual analysis

A large proportion of the data shared on Facebook is still text. Video may involve larger
data volumes in terms of megabytes, but in terms of insights, text can still be just as
rich. A picture may paint 1,000 words, but if you just want to answer a simple question,
you often don’t need 1,000 words. Every bit of data which isn’t essential to answering
your question is just noise, and more importantly, a waste of resources to store and
analyze.

Facebook uses a tool it developed itself called DeepText to extract meaning from words
we post by learning to analyze them contextually. Neural networks analyze the
relationship between words to understand how their meaning changes depending on
other words around them. Because this is semi-unsupervised learning, the algorithms
do not necessarily have reference data – for example a dictionary – explaining the
meaning of every word. Instead, it learns for itself based on how words are used.

This means that it won’t be tripped up by variations in spelling, slang or idiosyncrasies

of language use. In fact, Facebook say the technology is “language agnostic” – due to
the way it assigns labels to words, it can easily switch between working across different
human languages and apply what it has learned from one to another.

At present the tool is used to direct people towards products they may want to
purchase based on conversations they are having – this video gives an example of how
it decides whether providing a user with a shopping link is appropriate or not,
depending on the context.

2. Facial recognition

Facebook uses a DL application called DeepFace to teach it to recognize people in

photos. It says that its most advanced image recognition tool is more successful than
humans in recognizing whether two different images are of the same person or not –
with DeepFace scoring a 97% success rate compared to humans with 96%.

It’s fair to say that use of this technology has proven controversial. Privacy
campaigners said it went too far as it would allow Facebook – based on a high
resolution photograph of a crowd - to put names to many of the faces which is clearly
an obstacle to our freedom to move in public anonymously. EU legislators agreed and
persuaded Facebook to remove the functionality from European citizens’ accounts in
2013. Back then the social media giant was using an earlier version of the facial
recognition tool which did not use Deep Learning. Facebook has been somewhat quiet
about the development of this technology since it first hit headlines, and can be
assumed to be waiting on the outcome of pending privacy cases before saying more
about their plans to roll it out.

3. Targeted advertising

Facebook uses deep neural networks – the foundation stones of deep learning – to
decide which adverts to show to which users. This has always been the cornerstone of
its business, but by tasking machines themselves to find out as much as they can about
us, and to cluster us together in the most insightful ways when serving us ads, it hopes
to maintain a competitive edge against other high-tech competitors such as Google
who are fighting for supremacy of the same market.

4. Designing AI applications
Facebook has even decided that the task of deciding which processes can be improved
by AI and Deep Learning can be handled by machines. A system called Flow has been
implemented which uses Deep Learning analysis to run simulations of 300,000
machine learning models every month, to allow engineers to test ideas and pinpoint
opportunities for efficiency.

Open source

Facebook is a strong supporter of Open Source and makes most of the work of its AI
labs Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) freely available for anyone to use
or modify however they like. Most of Facebook’s Deep Learning is built on
the Torch platform, a development environment focused on the development of deep
learning technologies and neural networks.

It has even open sourced the design of its graphics processer unit (GPU)-driven AI
hardware – super-fast computers optimized for carrying out Deep Learning tasks,
which are often processing-power intensive due to the vast numbers of calculations
involved and the speed of the incoming data they are built to handle.

Looking to the future

Deep Learning is likely to continue to play a key part in the future development of
Facebook. Although it is tight-lipped about potential new applications at the moment,
ideas which have been suggested include automatically generating audio descriptions
of pictures to assist the visually-impaired, and to predict where greater coverage is
required in its mission to roll out internet access to poorly served parts of the world.
In the long-run work of their well-resourced AI and Deep Learning labs is likely to
provide benefit to countless other organizations too, either directly through use of
their services, or indirectly thanks to their support of open source principles.