Facebook:

building the connected world

SCENARIOS

The social media leader recently unveiled new steps in its 10 Year Plan. This aims to connect the world and deliver better user experience for various services such as video.

Mike Schroepfer

FACEBOOK CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER

During Facebook’s 2016 F8 developer’s conference CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared the company’s ten-year road map. The overall goal: to allow anyone to share whatever they want with anyone else, anywhere in the world. The ten-year vision is based on connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR).

According to Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer, the company will “work in the open” and “build communities” around projects related to these key technologies, to enable faster innovation. Facebook is also applying learnings from scaling their global infrastructure to their work in connectivity. Efforts in scaling infrastructure, such as fibre, are being based on engagement with operators to understand their priorities.

Connectivity

Today, only a third of the world is connected to the internet. Facebook aims to develop infrastructure at a planetary scale to bring some four billion people online, who currently lack internet access. This is being tackled with new approaches to infrastructure in areas that are difficult to access, such as the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). The company is also a key part of the Open Compute Project, which aims to realize scalable and sustainable data centre, network and hardware designs.

What to expect from Facebook over the next ten years

Why Virtual Reality Will Matter to You: watch Mike Schrieffer’s keynote

Artificial Intelligence

Introducing AI that understands context should result in intuitive interfaces and truly intelligent computer systems. These should help users find whatever they’re looking for in the ever-increasing volumes of online information. Deep learning systems are being supported by Memory Networks, which add a kind of short-term memory to convolutional neural networks and improves these systems’ understanding of language.

Aided by Facebook’s Memory Networks technology, Artificial Intelligence answers questions about the Lord of the Rings…

For a detailed explanation of the technology, see this paper.

Virtual Reality

Immersive virtual reality and augmented reality based on the latest technologies should provide a convincing, immersive sense of being in a different place. An important goal here is to bring people in different places together and allow them to share experiences.