Microsoft reveals its new artificial intelligence system, Project Adam

Developed by Microsoft, Project Adam is a new deep-learning system modelled after the human brain that has greater image classification accuracy and is 50 times faster than other systems in the industry. The goal of Project Adam is to enable software to visually recognise any object.

Project Adam uses inspiration from the human brain to absorb new data and teach itself new skills — such as distinguishing among different breeds of dogs.
It aims to demonstrate that large-scale, commodity distributed systems can train huge deep neural networks effectively. For proof, the researchers created the world’s best photograph classifier, using 14 million images from ImageNet, an image database divided into 22,000 categories.

The system was demonstrated at Microsoft’s Faculty Summit in Redmond recently (video below), as Microsoft brought out several different breeds of dogs on stage and showed how the technology could automatically distinguish among them in real time, using computer vision and insights from large sets of data.  The system was integrated into Cortana, Microsoft's digital assistant platform.