9 March, 2016, USA: Facebook is taking a step forward to map the world with its technology. The social media giant, now wants build its own map using artificial intelligence. This step will assist Facebook to scale the human population across the world and the data collected through Facebook map will help in launching its solar-powered planes that transmit internet service.
The company seeks to create ‘much more accurate population maps’ across 21.6 million square kilometers of Earth compared to traditional population maps, reports TOI. Sharing his views on the development, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook said in a post, “This is an impressive project from our team developing solar-powered planes for beaming down internet connectivity and our AI research team. Many people live in remote communities and accurate data on where people live doesn’t always exist. We can’t beam internet connectivity to people if we don’t know where communities are, so we built AI technology to analyze 15.6 billion satellite images to create much more accurate population maps across 21.6 million square kilometers of Earth. 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.”
Recently, Facebook made another announcement to enhance the IT sector in Europe. The company has decided to donate around 25 computer servers, each with eight graphics processing units (GPU). With this step, company is looking forward to accelerate it research work in the field artificial intelligence. Germany will be the first European country to get servers from Facebook.
