Facebook Is Trying to Figure Out How to Automatically Detect Mirror Selfies

In the picture above, you see some dude (it me) taking a picture of himself in his dingy bathroom mirror. A classic mirror selfie, if you will. When even the most advanced artificially intelligent image recognition software sees that image, however, it sees something very different. It might see a man, a phone, a white checkered shirt--this would be a cutting-edge analysis that's only newly possible, by the way--but it wouldn't identify the image as a mirror selfie, or a selfie at all. Solving the mirror selfie problem is one of the most important questions left when it comes to machine vision: Image recognition software can now fairly reliably describe what it's seeing, but it lacks the cultural knowledge or reasoning skills to put it into context.