Facebook AI Helping to Create Population Maps

With its Gratis Basics initiative, Facebook wants to bring Internet admission to the billions of people who don't yet have Web access. In guild to observe those people, though, the company's engineers are building a world map based on satellite imagery that they promise will be more complete than whatsoever census ever taken.

The goal, according to a Facebook blog post, is fairly simple: match population patterns with the type of technology needed to evangelize Net access. A remote hamlet could be brought online with a combination of Wi-Fi and cellular signals. Conventional terrestrial cables could link a string of fishing huts. The most isolated outposts could be served past a solar-powered drone that tin can wing for months at a fourth dimension.

Cataloging these population patterns is not as simple every bit scanning a bunch of satellite images. More than than 99 percent of the images Facebook is working with comprise no human settlements at all. And then its programmers modified the artificial intelligence engine that detects faces in users' photos, teaching information technology how to search for buildings instead.

Twenty countries, 21.half-dozen million square kilometers and 350TB of imagery later, Facebook says its results are non only accurate enough to guide its connectivity efforts, merely could too provide governments with a way to verify census data. The data will be released to the public later this year.

In the meantime, Facebook is developing the technologies to deliver Internet access at breakneck speed. According to CEO Marker Zuckerberg, the company's drone is already performing weekly test flights. It has the "wingspan of a 747 but weighs about as much equally a car," he said during a keynote address today at MWC in Barcelona. "At that place are solar panels on the wings and then it can stay aloft for three to six months at a fourth dimension."

The drone will axle Internet to remote areas with a behemothic light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, which is proving challenging to design. Zuckerberg likened it to shooting a laser arrow from California and hitting the Statue of Liberty in New York.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.