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April 9, 2019 03:30 pm

Facebook is Using AI To Map Population Density Around the World

Facebook has always been a company with global ambition, but few projects illustrate this better than its ongoing attempt to map the world's population density using AI. From a report: The company first unveiled this work back in 2016 when it created maps for 22 nations. Today, it expanded that with new maps that cover the "majority" of Africa. "The project will eventually map nearly the whole world's population," Facebook said in a blog post. As Facebook explains, creating maps like this is a challenging job for humans. Although we have high-resolution satellite imagery that covers pretty much every corner of the globe, turning this into useful information is a time-consuming process. To create population density maps, for example, humans have to label each building in the images, then cross-reference this with census data. This is particularly tricky in the African continent where census tracts can cover regions as large as 150,000 square miles but contain just 55,000 people. Luckily, this sort of task -- tedious but simple -- is perfect for AI. To automate this process, Facebook's engineers used data from open-source mapping project Open Street Map to train a computer vision system that can recognize buildings in satellite imagery. They then used this to remove the vast majority of the satellite data that showed unoccupied land.

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