AI is Supercharging the Creation of Maps Around the World (fb.com) 49
For those of us who live in places where driving directions are available at our fingertips, it might be surprising to learn that millions of miles of roads around the world have yet to be mapped. From a blog post: For more than 10 years, volunteers with the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project have worked to address that gap by meticulously adding data on the ground and reviewing public satellite images by hand and annotating features like roads, highways, and bridges. It's a painstaking manual task. But, thanks to AI, there is now an easier way to cover more areas in less time". With assistance from Map With AI (a new service that Facebook AI researchers and engineers created) a team of Facebook mappers has recently cataloged all the missing roads in Thailand and more than 90 percent of missing roads in Indonesia. Map With AI enabled them to map more than 300,000 miles of roads in Thailand in only 18 months, going from a road network that covered 280,000 miles before they began to 600,000 miles after. Doing it the traditional way -- without AI -- would have taken another three to five years, estimates Xiaoming Gao, a Facebook research scientist who helped lead the project.
"We were really excited about this achievement because it has proven Map With AI works at a large scale," Gao says. Starting today, anyone will be able to use the Map With AI service, which includes access to AI-generated road mappings in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, with more countries rolling out over time. As part of Map With AI, Facebook is releasing our AI-powered mapping tool, called RapiD, to the OSM community. RapiD is an enhanced version of the popular OSM editing tool iD. RapiD is designed to make adding and editing roads quick and simple for anyone to use; it also includes data integrity checks to ensure that new map edits are consistent and accurate. You can find out more about RapiD at mapwith.ai.
"We were really excited about this achievement because it has proven Map With AI works at a large scale," Gao says. Starting today, anyone will be able to use the Map With AI service, which includes access to AI-generated road mappings in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, with more countries rolling out over time. As part of Map With AI, Facebook is releasing our AI-powered mapping tool, called RapiD, to the OSM community. RapiD is an enhanced version of the popular OSM editing tool iD. RapiD is designed to make adding and editing roads quick and simple for anyone to use; it also includes data integrity checks to ensure that new map edits are consistent and accurate. You can find out more about RapiD at mapwith.ai.
Following Google maps is scary in many places. (Score:1)
Last fall I was in a rural part of Italy, and we were following the Google lady. She took us on a windy, one way road, in pitch black. It wasn't fun.
Now, you might say "use common sense". That's true, and I often agree with that. But in this case there's a fork in the road, and there's no way to tell which way is the less frightening road. It's not _exactly_ Google maps fault here, it's that many parts of the world don't have good roads, and you have to know the area well enough to know which ones are
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I am in Thailand right now, and Google maps is actually quite conservative here. Its routing algorithm avoids variety of mapped roads (showing up on Google's own maps). Not sure what the criteria is, but at least some of these were unpaved/gravel/dirt, and while perfectly drivable, I guess Google has additional info and tries to stay on the safe side.
I am sure once self-driving car AI is joined together with self-mapping AI they'll figure it out in no time.
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going from a road network that covered 280,000 miles before they began to 600,000 miles after
They did the same in glorious nation of Kazakhstan. Went from road network covering 18 miles before they begin map to 28 miles after. Jagshemash!
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I thought this was all already built from Cell Phone GPS data....and automajically updated to last known driving conditions. Google surely collects enough data from cars ahead of you on the same road to give you the information.
After typing the above though, I noticed you said RURAL. Perhaps the methodology doesn't work in areas of low connectivity.
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I reconnoiter in advance using Satellite view and, if available, topo maps.
Plan your mission before you travel. It's easier and less stressful than ignorance.
FB? Sure. (Score:2)
"With assistance from Map With AI (a new service that Facebook AI researchers and engineers created) a team of Facebook mappers has recently cataloged all the missing roads in Thailand and more than 90 percent of missing roads in Indonesia. "
And when you follow some of these 'roads' you'll see the asses of the elephants who made them this morning.
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Smells like opportunity. Replace the chain with a credit-card operated gate on both ends, and sell RFID tags to locals.
Do they have to call it that? (Score:1)
Any time that someone writes a new program that even "assists" in doing something they have to call it "AI."
If this one is so intelligent let's see it map the canals on Mars or the ocean trenches on Earth and see how far it gets. No? Then it isn't really "AI" like Lt. Cmdr. Data. It is just a program that uses some complex data driven learning techniques. Probably very clever but not the level of "intelligence."
I remember when the mouse (and before that the light pen) was called "AI." Do people st
Re:Do they have to call it that? (Score:5, Informative)
Any time that someone writes a new program that even "assists" in doing something they have to call it "AI."
No, any time someone writes a program that does something that we previously didn't know how to write programs to do, but which humans can do easily, that's called "AI".
This definition is due to history, and how the field evolved. In the late 50s when AI research began, it was thought that it would be pretty easy to build a human-like intelligence, with some research and some effort. Progress was pretty rapid early on, the researchers were able to solve various small sub-problems pretty easily and assumed they'd be able to continue just scaling that effort up. It became clear within a few years that replicating human intelligence was harder than expected, but incremental progress continued, in the form of finding ways to make computers do more an more hard-to-program and fuzzy sort of tasks that humans do easily. All of these incremental steps were and are called "AI".
Don't get hung up on thinking that "artificial intelligence" must be human-like "intelligence". "Artificial intelligence" is a term of art, a piece of jargon, of the field of computer science. The jargon for human-like intelligence is "Artificial General Intelligence", AGI, not AI. You should feel free to get annoyed if anyone calls algorithms that find road in maps AGI, because it clearly isn't. But such road-finding algorithms clearly do fall into the category of AI, as the term is used in computer science.
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Nothing you said makes it better. All you did was defend a poor definition by saying "that's what we do."
Re:Do they have to call it that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing you said makes it better. All you did was defend a poor definition by saying "that's what we do."
No, I just explained that this term has a specific meaning in computer science that isn't necessarily the same as what an outside observer might assume the term means. This is normal for industry-specific jargon, in every industry.
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A friend of mine got his PhD doing AI research maybe 20 years ago. He used to get mad at me when I’d say “so basically you guys are redefining ‘intelligence’ because you haven’t been able to figure out real intelligence”.
You shouldn’t be surprised when people get annoyed at this particular “term of art” any more than when people get on Tesla for “autopilot”. When a term is frequently used by industry/research insiders to communicate with the
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Not unreasonable, but if you take the position that "intelligence" means only "human-level intelligence", then you'll have to pick a better term that means "the ability to use experience to learn and adapt to new data". Because that's what AI is doing, even if it's specific to relatively narrow fields.
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When a term is frequently used by industry/research insiders to communicate with the general population, those people have a reasonable expectation for the term itself to be actually representative of the what it means.
Meh. Anyone who has paid any attention to this space understands that the term AI is used for all sorts of things that aren't human-level intelligence, indeed if it were reserved for that the term couldn't be used at all. The OP who first complained and prompted my explanation clearly understood it, even if his definition (a program that "assists") was incorrect.
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We also use Verbs, Adjectives and Adverbs as Nouns constantly in the tech industry as well.
Re:Do they have to call it that? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is actually old news and Google has been using it to great success for years. Did you notice that Google Maps got accurate 3D buildings a few years ago, accurately modelling odd shaped roofs and structures even in relatively obscure locations? Suddenly bridges were 3D models with a gap under them, instead of the weird "melted" Apple Maps look?
They build an AI that could model structures from satellite and areal photography. It was almost all automated with very little manual clean-up needed, which is why they could cover so much of the Earth so quickly.
Image recognition is a classic application of AI, by the way.
And what do I care if some Zuckerberg acolyte (Score:3)
is trying to come up with ways to profit from OSM?
I am as likely to go to Facebook as I am to click on a 419 scam.
Less likely, because 419 spams are sometimes funny.
Fuck of, neo-Stasi.
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Facebook doesn't have good mapping data so they are behind Apple/Google. Better contribute to OSM rather than paying Apple/Google. Amazon has this problem too.
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AI has been essential for years (Score:3)
The Google Maps team has been using AI of various kinds for years to extract all sorts of features -- streets, building shapes, addresses and more -- from street view and aerial and satellite imagery, and I'm sure most everyone else making maps has been doing it as well.
I can tell you it doesn't work well (Score:2)
My driveway is listed as a road. Other roads that don't connect are assumed to connect by different map apps. I've been taken down roads that turn into nothing or a mud pit.
Facebook breakup time? (Score:3)
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Consumers may *use* Facebook as just a "social media novelty". But it takes a massive amount of sophisticated engineering to make Facebook work for literally billions of users. There are plenty of technology advancements involved.
This project, in particular, seems intended to improve the maps Facebook uses for events and so on. It can't use Google Maps (their competitor) so currently they use OpenStreetMap. Improving OpenStreetMap or replacing it with a better map would be good business for them.
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We need address collection for OSM (Score:2)
I went on vacation a few months back, to an area with very poor cellular service which made most GPS applications useless. My OSM app allowed me to download the local maps ahead of time, and so I felt confident I would not get lost. When I arrived at the airport and told this app to find the place I was staying, nothing. Ony two addresses existed in OSM on "Main Street", and this single street happened to be 53 miles long! Having no addresses in the database made the OSM maps almost useless until I actually
Trails (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:2)
computers are found to be faster than humans at processing data.
(Yawn)
Right (Score:2)
And who's checked them?
Crowd source it. (Score:1)
Give users an App that aggregates their movement data.
Job would be done in no time, with the most popular roads reaching your threshold in no time at all.