Facebook Creates Software That Matches Faces Almost as Well as You Do | MIT Technology Review

The "connected" part of Facebook's mission statement ("Founded in 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected") may be more automated in the future

"Asked whether two unfamiliar photos of faces show the same person, a human being will get it right 97.53 percent of the time. New software developed by researchers at Facebook can score 97.25 percent on the same challenge, regardless of variations in lighting or whether the person in the picture is directly facing the camera.
That’s a significant advance over previous face-matching software, and it demonstrates the power of a new approach to artificial intelligence known as deep learning, which Facebook and its competitors have bet heavily on in the past year (see “Deep Learning”). This area of AI involves software that uses networks of simulated neurons to learn to recognize patterns in large amounts of data."

Facebook Creates Software That Matches Faces Almost as Well as You Do | MIT Technology Review