Facebook on Monday began using artificial intelligence to help people with visual impairments enjoy photos posted at the leading social network. Facebook introduced machine learning technology trained to recognize objects in pictures and then describe photos aloud. "As Facebook becomes an increasingly visual experience, we hope our new automatic alternative text technology will help the blind community experience Facebook the same way others enjoy it," said accessibility specialist Matt King. The feature was being tested on mobile devices powered by Apple iOS software and which have screen readers set to English. Facebook planned to expand the capability to devices with other kinds of operating systems and add more languages, according to King, who lost his vision as a US college student studying electrical engineering.

Nowadays it's possible for anyone to exploit the huge volumes of information available through big data and open datasets, whether you are a data scientist, an enterprise developer, or a small startup. Amazon Machine Learning lets you focus completely on your data, without wasting your time with countless trial models or complicated math. We believe that machine learning as a service has a great potential in making any application smarter, by making it easy to use for developers of all skill levels. This Lab will offer a very brief overview of the main machine learning concepts and then use an open dataset from UCI to train and use a real-world model for HAR (Human Activity Recognition). We will walk through the whole process, from the dataset analysis and Datasource creation, all the way to model training/evaluation and a real Python script to generate real time predictions.

Just in time for the start of baseball season, Apple has beefed up Siri's knowledge of baseball stats, scores, and trivia. Siri can now do things like tell you Babe Ruth's career batting average, the lineup of the 2008 World Series-winning Phillies, or even who won the World Series in 1934. Siri has also learned how to do league-level queries from 29 different baseball leagues, ranging from the Cape Cod League to Nippon Pro Baseball. While Siri won't support player-specific data from these leagues, she will return scores from all of them. While not necessarily an essential update, these new features are a fun way to get celebrate the return of baseball.

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Artificial intelligence is meant to be taking over the world, but along the way, it seems to be helping out humans from time to time. Today's example: Facebook is using its artificial intelligence network to describe photos to the blind. If your Facebook feed is anything like mine, the vast majority of my friends' posts are either photos or links. Without being able to see photos, blind users are being left out of a huge chunk of the social interaction happening on Facebook. The company's answer is automatic alternative text: a neural network analyses photos, and if it's at least 80 percent confident it understands what's going on, the AI will describe the photo.

In an effort to improve the social networking experience for users with visual impairments, Facebook has introduced a new feature in its iOS app to help them'see' photos. With the help of AI, the app automatically generates a description of each photo a user comes across. When they're using a screen reader on iOS, they'll be able to hear a list of items in the pictures, such as "Image may contain three people, smiling, outdoors." Get your company on stage at TNW Europe. The descriptions, called Automatic Alternative Text, are generated as image alt text.

Facebook today announced the launch of a feature called automatic alternative text. It's a big step forward in accessibility because it will allow people who use screen readers -- software that provides spoken descriptions of what's onscreen -- to receive summaries of what's contained in photos that people post on Facebook. Until this point, only the name of the person, the person's share text, and the word "photo" was declared by a screen reader's automated voice when a post with a photo appeared in the News Feed. Now, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), certain people with disabilities will be able to get a better understanding of what their friends are trying to communicate. The new captions are short and at times so simple that they're poetic.

Throughout history, technological innovations have advanced and changed how people live, work and survive. First was the Agricultural Revolution, then Industrial Revolution, and now we are towards the end of the Digital Revolution. The Internet, mobile and smartphone industries are at the end of the technology adoption life cycle, having reached significant market penetration and maturity in developed nations. Scientists, researchers and pioneering venture capital investors are on the edge of creating the next major epoch in history, the Artificial Intelligence Revolution (or AIR, as an acronym). There are several factors contributing to the rise in advancements in Artificial Intelligence.

People love playing video games together, whether in the same room or remotely. I just saw a demonstration of how we might soon be able to play together in augmented reality, too. The demo was a treat because virtual reality and its cousin augmented reality--in which digital imagery is overlaid on your view of the real world--are still very isolating. You tend to use them while wearing a dopey-looking headset, and chances are that whatever digital imagery you're seeing, you're checking it out all alone. To start, we each picked one of four little avatars (all called Poly, short for "polygon") to hover near our shoulders; they looked like silvery robot heads glowing in different bright colors (mine was blue).

WITH the recent triumph of the Google AlphaGo program over Go master Lee Se-dol in Seoul, the doomsayers are in full chorus again over the spectre of Hollywood-style artificial intelligence (AI) taking over humanity. It was the same fear in the late 1990s when IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer beat then reigning chess world champion Garry Kasparov. There are a few differences however: Go is considered a much more intricate game than chess, and AI technology has improved quite a bit since then, and we're seeing breakthroughs such as Google's self-driving cars, virtual assistants like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, and even IBM Watson's win in popular trivia quiz Jeopardy!. Enough that even sober scientists are taking note. In a December 2014 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), renowned physicist Stephen Hawking expressed his concerns, saying that AI poses a threat to humanity's existence, despite its usefulness. "It would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate," he said, echoing futurist Ray Kurzweil's warning of the technological'singularity,' the hypothetical point at which an AI can develop and build even smarter machines beyond human understanding.