SIMPLY: AI

FEATURING MAPPING: FACIAL RECOGNITION

Facial recognition is a form of computer vision technology (see opposite) that matches photographs or videos of human faces to those stored in a database. An image of a face is captured, and its distinctive features, such as the distance between the eyes, are mapped to create a unique "faceprint" that is then compared with known faceprints. Facial recognition is mainly used for security, such as an authentication process on phones and law enforcement, such as to identify someone from a database of known offenders.

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING: UNDERSTANDING WORDS

The ability of computers to "understand" and generate natural language - that is, language as it is spoken and written by humans - is key to mimicking human intelligence (see pp.130-131). Natural language processing (NLP), the research field dedicated to developing this ability, combines AI, linguistics, and other disciplines. In the 1950s, researchers tried to emulate "liguistic intelligence" by providing computers with rules to categorize language. More recently, the explosion in computing power and big data (see p.33) has enabled machine learning - particularly among its many applications, NLP is used in machine translation (see opposite) and virtual assistance (see p.116).

--SIMPLY: AI, Page 111-112