Microsoft Research introduced “Project Adam” AI machine-learning object recognition software at its 2014 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit. The goal of Project Adam is to enable software to visually recognize any object, a very ambitious project.
The immense neural network in human brains makes those kinds of associations possible through trillions of connections. Project Adam generated a massive dataset of 14 million images from the Web and sites such as Flickr, made up of more than 22,000 categories drawn from user-generated tags. Using 30 times fewer machines than other systems, that data was used to train a neural network made up of more than two billion connections.
This scalable infrastructure is twice more accurate in its object recognition and 50 times faster than other systems, Microsoft researchers claim. The researchers did a live demo of dog-breed detection integrated into Project Adam’s technology, pointing to two dogs and asking, “Cortana, what dog breed is this?,” with correct answers.