Pinterest And Facebook announced a new visual search feature

Pinterest is taking big data to another level. The social network has just announced a new visual search feature: a search tool that will allow users to select just a portion of an image, and then look for other similar images within the site. In collaboration with members of the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center, Pinterest uses deep machine learning to learn image features based on their richly annotated dataset of billions of Pins. Those features are then used to create a similarity score between any two images. The result is that if you see a lamp you love in a pin of a living room, you can select the lamp, and search for other similar lamps — as well as where to buy them. Facebook is doing more with photos, too. In a separate announcement, Facebook has added a new feature to its Messenger app that will look at your phone’s camera roll for any photos you may have snapped of your Facebook friends, and then prompt you to share them with those friends. Facebook says it is solving a problem of the digital age: that you may have dozens of photos of friends on your phone that you never get around to sharing. Facebook’s powerful facial recognition algorithm hopes to make that a problem of the past by recognizing your friends and prompting you to share the photos. Users can opt out of facial recognition, and users must opt in to the new Photo Magic feature to get notifications about images they may want to share. But Facebook isn’t the only one putting the new algorithms to work. A recent update to the Photos app included with the Mac OS offers a smart album called “selfies” that — you guessed it — picks out all the photos it believes you’ve taken of yourself. In both cases, the technology represents yet another step forward in treating photos as quantifiable data. Algorithms are becoming increasingly intelligent and able to help us understand what or who (in Facebook’s case) is in a photo or video. Until now. Now, photos can be analyzed by ‘robot algorithms’ to give them structure — what’s in it, what color is it, where was it taken, who is in it, are the people pulling a happy or sad face, etc. This opens up an entirely new realm of data to mine for insights. And social media is at the very forefront of applying the technology.