Google’s Cloud Automl Vision system — a machine-learning-based image classifier — is now available to the general public; anyone can sign up to the program, upload a set of 20-10,000 images and train a new model with them, which they can then use.
It’s pretty canny of Google, who get a lot of training data for free out of it.
But it’s also likely to be a godsend for security researchers, who can use their access to probe the classifier for weaknesses, building on the existing body of work that has revealed the fundamental fragility of these systems.
Mike White, CTO and SVP, for Disney Consumer Products and Interactive Media, says: “Cloud AutoML’s technology is helping us build vision models to annotate our products with Disney characters, product categories and colors. These annotations are being integrated into our search engine to enhance the impact on Guest experience through more relevant search results, expedited discovery and product recommendations on shopDisney.”And Sophie Maxwell, Conservation Technology Lead at the Zoological Society of London, tells us: “ZSL is an international conservation charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats. A key requirement to deliver on this mission is to track wildlife populations to learn more about their distribution and better understand the impact humans are having on these species. In order to achieve this, ZSL has deployed a series of camera traps in the wild that take pictures of passing animals when triggered by heat or motion. The millions of images captured by these devices are then manually analysed and annotated with the relevant species, such as elephants, lions and giraffes, etc., which is a labour-intensive and expensive process. ZSL’s dedicated Conservation Technology Unit has been collaborating closely with Google’s Cloud ML team to help shape the development of this exciting technology, which ZSL aims to use to automate the tagging of these images—cutting costs, enabling wider-scale deployments and gaining a deeper understanding of how to conserve the world’s wildlife effectively.”
Cloud AutoML: Making AI accessible to every business [Fei-Fei Li/Google]
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