A student project has shown another power of AI—it can be good at locating where photos were taken. The project is known as Predicting Image Geolocations (or PIGEON, for short). It’s the work of three Stanford students: Michal Skreta, Silas Alberti and Lukas Haas. They designed it in order to find out locations on Google Street View (谷歌街景).

When presented with a few personal photos it had never seen before, the program was, in most cases, able to make accurate (准确的) guesses about where the photos were taken. PIGEON works well because it can pick up on all the little things in photos. It can notice small differences in leaves, soil and weather.

Like so many applications of AI, it could help people find out the locations of old photos from relatives. It may also allow scientists to do surveys of an area for invasive (入侵的) plants. Skreta believes ordinary people will also find it useful. “You like this place in Italy. Where in the world could you go if you want to see something similar?” he says.

Just as a saying goes, “ ▲ .” It’s worth noting that the program could also be used to let out information about people that they never wanted to share, says Jay Stanley, an expert at the American Civil Liberties Union. Stanley worries that companies might soon use AI to find out where you’ve traveled. Governments might check your photos to see if you’ve visited certain countries. Being followed is also a great threat, he says. While people have long been able to remove GPS location information from photos they post online, that may not work anymore. “From a privacy point of view, your location can be a very sensitive (敏感的) set of information,” he says.

Stanley thinks the use of AI for geolocation will become even more powerful going forward. He doubts there’s much to be done—except to realize what’s in the background photos you post online.

There are millions of people throughout the world who are either born blind or have become blind over the course of their lifetime. It is unfair to take away the visual (视觉的) beauty of the world from these people. Doctor Humayun has created the world’s first bionic (仿生学的) eye that could change the life of every blind people in the world.

Doctor Mark Humayun is a well respected professor at the Doheny Eye Institute California. He has been working for years on creating a bionic eye that would allow blind people to see images just like a normal person does. The bionic eye is actually an eye that has been built in a small video camera.

The test results show the bionic eye has given blind patients the amazing ability to see the scientists doing the tests. But the images are still blurry (模糊的) and we need much work before the eye actually becomes a regular implant (植入物) into blind people. Humayun believes that he can go into production with the bionic eye over the next three to five years.

A closer look at the bionic eye is amazing. The patient wears a special set of eyeglasses. All the signals are passed to the implanted eye. It’s done by wireless technology. Humayun has created an invention that could change the lives of millions of people. Imagine a world in which someone would no longer have to fear about being blind. This could be considered a technological achievement.