How Does Facebook Identify Where You Are From Your Profile Photo?

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We all know that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is strongly passionate about Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, but how has that impacted our everyday online social life?
You may think you’re just uploading a photo, but facebook knows how many people are there, whether you’re outside or inside, and if you’re smiling.
The technology that Facebook uses, Artificial Intelligence, is a rigorous science that focuses on designing systems that make use of algorithms that are much similar to that of our human brain. AI learns to recognize patterns from large amounts of data and come up with a comprehensive conclusion.

What does that have to do with how Facebook knows if I’m smiling or not?

Facebook is constantly teaching their machines to work better. By using deep learning, they train AI to structure through various processing layers and understanding an abstract representation of what the data could be. By using their system called “convolutional neural network”, the computer is able to go through layers of units and understand whether there is a dog in a photo.

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Facebook works through layers. In the first layer, it is able to identify the edges of objects. In the second layer, it is able to detect combinations and identify it to be an eye in a face or a window in a plane. The next layer combines these further and identifies them to be either an entire face or a wing on a plane. The final layer is able to further detect these combinations and identifies if it is a person or a plane.
The network needs to be able to read the labels on the database and identify which of these are labeled as humans or plants. The system learns to associate the input with the label. The way facebook works is that it is able to now identify not only that there are humans in a photo, but how many humans, whether they are indoors or outdoors, and their actions, i.e. if they are sitting or standing.
However, a photograph that has been uploaded may need to be completely zoomed in for Facebook’s AI to understand intricacies if a person is smiling or not.

It may not always be perfect in its recognition, but it’s getting there.
A lot of information can be extracted from a photograph. Facebook is only going to get better with its AI and making use of big data.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is a concept that will be looked at in Imarticus’s Data Science Prodegree. This course is a cutting-edge program designed and delivered in collaboration with Genpact, a leader in Analytics solutions. Students get their hands-on learning with 6 industry projects and work with industry mentors.

Written by Tenaz Shanice Cardoz, Marketing & Communications.


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Basics About Topic Modelling As A Data Analytics Technique

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The Data Science industry has brought about various new avenues into the world of business and internet of things. Here, data analytics as a field, basically deals with extracting ‘information’ from all the obtained data. With rapid digitalization and increasing of the boundaries of the virtual world, the generation and availability of data is on an all-time high. While some of this data might be pre-processed and structured, most of it is just not structured at all. This causes a lot of difficulties when it comes to the part, where relevant and important information is required. That’s where the tools and technologies of the data analytics industry come into play. These are powerful methods, developed by technology and can be used for sifting through the volumes of data and sniffing out, exactly what a professional is looking for. One of the subsets of these technology is the field of text mining, which basically deals with the technique known as Topic Modelling.
This process mainly deals with, identifying topics present in a text object and deriving hidden patterns automatically, thus aiding in the betterment of decision making. This process differs from other run of the mill text mining approaches, which basically deal with regular search techniques or keywords searching techniques based on any random dictionary. A specific bunch of words that is supposed to be found and observed by a professional, is known as “topics”, which usually are present in large clusters of texts. Topic modelling is the unsupervised approach to performing the above mentioned action, with only the machine and no manual help.
Data Science CourseTopics in other words are, “a pattern of co-occuring terms in a corpus, which keeps repeating itself”. For instance

while building a topic model for healthcare, it should be devised in such a way that it results in words like, health, doctor, patient, hospital and other related words. These topic models are very useful when it comes to processes such as, document clustering, organizing large blocks of textual data, feature selection and retrieval of information from unstructured text and so on. What makes this technique so very important is that it can be used in almost any field from print media to marketing and still be relevant and product centric. For example, there are top gun newspaper publishing houses like, The New York Times, who have a team working on perfecting topic models so as to boost their article recommendations for users. There are a lot of advanced HR teams dabbling in this sector by trying to use it to match perfect candidates, with perfect job profiles
These text models are also used in various other applications such as organization of large datasets of emails, customer reviews and user social media profiles. These are some of the reasons why professionals specializing in this technique are gradually becoming sought after. As the demand of companies rises, the amount of people opting to get trained in these techniques also goes up. Imarticus Learning has various industry intensive course offerings for various data analytics tools like Python, which uses this topic modeling technique most extensively.