[Imports] Facebook's AI-Assisted Road Tracing for OSM

[Christoph Hormann]

On Thursday 16 March 2017, James wrote:
>
> Seeing as facebooks computational power will rival that of super
> computers, even if you wanted to recreate it, it would probably take
> you 1000 years of home computing power to "train" the neural network
> to recognise roads, at which point we will all be dead.

That is not how this works although i understand how PR of Facebook and 
others makes people believe that.

You can perfectly use neural networks and other 'artificial 
intelligence' techniques on hardware accessible to normal people.  The 
difficulty with getting useful results with such techniques is not the 
computing power required (this hardly ever is the case for anything 
these days), it lies in adjusting such a system for the task at hand 
and training it to produce useful results.  In contrast to an 
intelligent human who validates his/her conclusions with a large amount 
of life experience an artificial intelligence will happily produce any 
kind of nonsense if it is set up to do so - either voluntarily or 
accidently because of lack of expertise in using these techniques.

Which is exactly why we need to evaluate the results in full before an 
import in OSM and not just a small sample area.

This is also a kind of chicken-and-egg problem - people use 'artificial 
intelligence' techniques because they don't want to bother with 
analyzing and understanding the underlying mechanisms of a problem they 
are trying to solve so they say "let's just have the AI figure it out".  
However to really properly set up and train the AI they actually need a 
thorough understanding of the underlying mechanisms.

If Facebook does not want to open their methodology for whatever reason 
that is perfectly fine but if they want to import their results in OSM 
they need to either open their process or open the data as a whole for 
us to evaluate before the import - as i already explained in my initial 
reply.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/