The CEO of Digital Sky Technologies, the Russian venture capital firm that invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, says that he is a supporter and investor in Facebook partly because he believes the social network could become the basis for artificial intelligence.
During a conversation between DST CEO Yuri Milner and Federated Media CEO John Battelle, the venture capitalist stated that Facebook is the type of company that will fundamentally change the way information is processed. In fact, he said that it could change information to such an extent that it could be the basis for artificial intelligence over time.
Milner says that this process could happen quickly; Facebook could be one of the platforms for artificial intelligence technology in the next 10 years.
We can see why Milner says Facebook and AI are destined to be linked. Facebook is the central nexus of social data and the social graph; it is the online personification of personalities, interests, friendships and more. Eventually we can see companies tapping into Facebook’s API to augment their AI efforts and use that data to link AIs to the rest of the world.
Ten years seems awfully close, though. Then again, as a major investor in Facebook, Milner’s in a unique position to judge the potential of the company.

An Artificial Intelligence and RFID System for People
Detection and Orientation in Big Surfaces.
Bonifacio CASTAÑO
Departamento de Automática, Universidad de Alcalá
Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain
ABSTRACT
A common problem that users have to face in big surfaces,
with several floors, corridors and departments, is its correct
location and orientation. The problem gets even worst when
there are a big number of users and they have time constraints.
A typical example is a medical centre where the patients have
got scheduled doctor’s appointments and, in some cases,
severe movement difficulties. A possibility for solving this
problem is to provide the building with an intelligent system
for user detection and orientation. In addition this strategy
would allow to find and locate all the people inside the
building and to carry out an individual search if it were
necessary. This is the framework we have chosen in this
article. We have developed a complete system for people
detection and orientation in this scenario.
Keywords: Artificial intelligence, Detection, Monitoring,
Planning techniques, RFID,

1. INTRODUCTION
In this work we present an application, which includes
software and hardware elements, that gives a solution to this
problem. The whole system includes four different
subsystems. For detection and location of the users in the
building we use a hardware subsystem based on the RFID
(Radio Frequency Identification) passive technology [1].
Added to this we employ the techniques of artificial
intelligence [5], more concretely a planning tool [2,4], for
orientation and guiding of people [6]. All these elements are
combined within a global system that coordinates and controls
all the assembly of elements. This system has been
implemented satisfactorily in a scale prototype that has
successfully proved its viability and good performance.

Good thought, Lesley.... where is andy?