Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to reach every home around the world and for that, he’s working on a map to find people across the world
Mark Zuckerberg plans to bring the entire world on Facebook’s platform, but this plan cannot be materialized until he finds all the people living in the world — Thus began the quest to develop technology that can accurately identify areas where people live.
Facebook‘s Mark Zuckerberg announced in a late Monday night post that its Connectivity Lab has succeeded in developing artificial intelligence that can map the areas where people reside in the world. Facebook’s Connectivity Lab conducts researches on expanding internet facility to the remotest areas of the world.
How the A.I. mapping technology was developed?
To locate people around the world, Tobias Tiecke, an engineer at Facebook, created a system that automatically identified locations where there are people using the most recent satellite images, approx. 15.6billion images and to develop the A.I. the Connectivity Lab utilized neural networks.
So, researchers at Facebook analyzed around 8,000 satellite images of a particular location let’s say India and marked locations where people were living. Then these markings were applied to the 15.6billion satellite images of the A.I. and compressed to a resolution of 16feet or 5meters.
The likeliness of error in this technology is precisely no more than 10 percent, claims engineering director at Connectivity Lab Yael Maguire.
At the moment, about 20 countries are currently covered by the new Facebook map. If this new map is combined with the recent census data, then we can have a fair idea about world’s population density.
Now, this is definitely a big achievement since accurate information about the locations where people reside on earth is a very difficult task. Previously just a general overview of locations was provided by the maps. But, Facebook’s A.I. can locate about 8.3million square miles or 21.6million square kilometers of the area to locate world’s population. This is a very beneficial step for Facebook as understandably the social network will be able to get more people hooked on its network.
The primary purpose of locating all the people in the world is explained by Zuckerberg in the post, which reads:
“We will share these maps openly with the community so other organizations can use them too. This should help with planning energy, health and transport infrastructure, as well as assisting people who need help in disasters.”
Facebook’s A.I mapping can be termed as an important and crucial step for the company prior to releasing solar powered internet drones into the stratosphere. The social network plans to drop WiFi signals via the internet drone upon us all. So, with this sort of technology, we will be able to get wireless connectivity everywhere even in a secluded, remote island.
