Facebook is applying computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) technology that it developed for visually impaired people to its image search function. Using its Lumos computer vision platform, Facebook will now enhance your image search results by actually "looking" at images and understanding the content within, reports TechCrunch. As Facebook explains on its developer blog, search today is based on tags and text. Images need to have the right tags and captions or search will simply not work. Lumos is a deep neural network, one implementation of AI that learns from experience.

A new computational model performs at human levels when subjected to standard intelligence test, making artificial intelligence (AI) system at par with human understanding capabilities. Researchers from Northwestern University built the new computational model on CogSketch, an artificial intelligence platform, that has the ability to solve visual problems and understand sketches in order to give immediate and interactive feedback. "The model performs in the 75th percentile for American adults, making it better than average," said Ken Forbus of Northwestern University, adding "The problems that are hard for people are also hard for the model, providing additional evidence that its operation is capturing some important properties of human cognition." Researchers noted that developing artificial intelligence systems that have this ability not only provides new evidence for the importance of symbolic representations and analogy in visual reasoning, but it could potentially shrink the gap between computer and human cognition. "Most artificial intelligence research today concerning vision focuses on recognition or labelling what is in a scene rather than reasoning about it," Forbus noted.