A computer can learn a lot about local demographics from Google Street View images

Each year, the U.S. Census Bureau spends $1 billion surveying the population. These surveys are designed to tease apart the demographic makeup of the country by asking a representative group of people about their race, gender, education, occupation, and so on. This is an important exercise because it gives a crucial bird's-eye view of the population and how it is changing. For a start, the data is relatively large scale--the Census Bureau's main survey, the American Community Survey, gives results for all cities and counties with a population greater than 65,000. What's more, surveying the population is a time-consuming exercise; so much so that some data can be five years old by the time it is published.