Machine Learning is Already in the Palm of your Hand

When most folks think about Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, they generally think it’s futuristic science fiction.  iRobot kind of stuff where androids take over the world and a courageous scientist must hack into the central computer to save the planet and restore humanity back on top.

But sometimes some of the best new tech comes disguised as just something really convenient.

You see if you did the iOS10 upgrade to your iPhone, you’re using machine learning right now and probably didn’t even know it.

The machine learning algorithm used by iOS runs natively on your iPhone.  You don’t have to upload your pictures to some High-Performance computing cluster in the sky.  When you take a picture, a lot of really cool things happen.  iOS tags that photo with the location and time.  Simple stuff given the GPS.

But iOS also runs each photo through about 10 Billion (According to Apple) calculations so iOS can recognize faces in your photos and group by person, but it also has advanced object recognition, making it possible to find images of any number of different things. Your little iPhone knows if you have taken pictures of food, cats, dogs, trees and automatically tags meta-data to your pictures for instant retrieval by those search criteria.


OK joke time, Question: What did Will Rogers say to the computer scientist? 


Answer: I never Meta-Data I didn't like.  Ugh. Sorry about that.

In my prior Blog The Fourth Industrial Revolution is Here and Why Google is Getting it Right I touched on how Google’s image and Video API’s were using the virtually unlimited horsepower of the Google Cloud to dissect videos and images pumped up to the Google Cloud to detect Great Danes from Poodles but to classify both as dogs.

Well with iOS10, your iPhone can do pretty much the same thing.

Here’s how to access it.  Go to your Photo Collections and click on the Search Icon. 

Up will pop a search bar and keyboard.  Simply type in the text of the image you want to search for.  In the first case, “Cats”. and IOS will use the predefined meta-data tags automatically associated with the images.  iOS gathers up “Cat” related images and presents you with the below collection.

Ridiculously simple. Machine Learning for the masses and the democratization of what was once highly advanced computer science in the palm of your hand.