TECHNOLOGY REPORT

Facebook Facts from Facebook.com as of August 2011:

These are Facebook facts as described by the company in August of 2011 – if you read this post later than that it’s likely most of these numbers have *increased*.       Very notable in my view is the huge number of “active users”, the huge collective time they spend online, and the fact that mobile users are twice as active as non-mobile, though this last point does not necessarily mean that use will increase as far more people flow into mobile use – rather it may simply indicate that early adopters in mobile are more active users and thus mobile use will trend along the lines of regular use as more mainstreamers start accessing Facebook on mobile devices.

Facebook  Facts:

More than 750 million active users

50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day

Average user has 130 friends

People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

Social Media Activity on Facebook

There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events

Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month

More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

Facebook’s Global Reach
More than 70 translations available on the site
About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

Facebook’s Social Media Platform
Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform
People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day
Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites
Since social plugins launched in April 2010, an average of 10,000 new websites integrate with Facebook every day
More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, including over 80 of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites

Facebook’s Mobile Exposure
There are more than 250 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

SyNAPSE Project AI Neuromorphic Chip

IBM’s Aug 18th Press Release announced another significant milestone for the DARPA SyNAPSE project, the world’s best funded and arguably the “most likely to succeed” approach to creating a general artificial intelligence.

The release notes that the new chips represent a departure from traditional models of computing:

…. cognitive computers are expected to learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember – and learn from – the outcomes, mimicking the brains structural and synaptic plasticity.

To do this, IBM is combining principles from nanoscience, neuroscience and supercomputing as part of a multi-year cognitive computing initiative. The company and its university collaborators also announced they have been awarded approximately $21 million in new funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for Phase 2 of the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project.

As we’ve noted here many times, another remarkable project is the Blue Brain Project in Europe spearheaded by Dr. Henry Markram.     That team has joined with many others and is in the process of applying to the European Union for substantial funding – perhaps as much as 1.6 billion dollars.    Although Blue Brain tends to shy away from stating that their objective is a general artificial intelligence,  I would argue that they should have that goal and also that they are much more likely to be funded by stating that goal in no uncertain terms.

Unfortunately there remain many both in and outside of technology circles who believe the search for a general artificial intelligence is either dangerous or a waste of time and money.   Both these scenarios are possible but unlikely.   Sure, intelligence can be dangerous but given human history compared to technology history it seems odd to argue that we are more likely to create a Frankenstein than a helpful machine process.    Computers don’t kill people, people kill people.

In terms of a waste of time and money, clearly we humans have overrated our intelligence for some time – probably since the beginning of self-awareness.   There are few rational reasons to reject the idea that we cannot duplicate processes that are similar to our own thinking in a machine.   The advantages of machine based intelligence are likely to be  substantial – probably on the order of a new human age with vastly improved resource efficiency, poverty reduction, and more.  Thus the costs – currently measured in the low tens of millions – pale in comparison to almost all other government projects – many with massively dubious and negative ROIs.

Dr. Dharmendra Modha and his SyNAPSE gang recently published an excellent paper about “Cognitive Computing” that updates what appears to be excellent progress in the effort to create a general artificial intelligence:

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/8/114944-cognitive-computing/fulltext

One of the paper’s most notable items asserts that within a decade the project expects to have the computational scale needed for human level modelling, though it also notes that this is not the same as creating a model of the human brain – this may require computational structures yet to be invented.    However on balance it would seem the SyNAPSE project continues to build on their core assumptions, taking us ever closer to the holy grail of technology – a general artificial intelligence.

More at Dr. Modha’s blog , where we learn more about the new approaches the SyNAPSE team at IBM will take in an effort to achieve human quality cognition in a machine:

18 Aug 2011: Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) researchers unveiled a new generation of experimental computer chips designed to emulate the brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition. The technology could yield many orders of magnitude less power consumption and space than used in today’s computers.

In a sharp departure from traditional concepts in designing and building computers, IBM’s first neurosynaptic computing chips recreate the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses in biological systems, such as the brain, through advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry. Its first two prototype chips have already been fabricated and are currently undergoing testing.

Called cognitive computers, systems built with these chips won’t be programmed the same way traditional computers are today. Rather, cognitive computers are expected to learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember – and learn from – the outcomes, mimicking the brains structural and synaptic plasticity.