Facebook, MIT join hands to assign addresses to people

There are about four billion people in the world who are living without a physical address. Facebook and the MIT Media Lab are teaming up to create a solution that will give these people a way of identifying their residence.

With the help of machine learning and satellite imagery, the team is building a system that will identify and assign addresses in a cheap and efficient manner, Engadget reported.

To create the solution, the team trained a deep-learning algorithm to scan the satellite images and identify the pixels and stitch them into a network of roads which could be analyzed for further labeling with numbers and letters.

Other than Facebook, Google too made efforts in the past to solve the issue of unaddressed rural lands. However, identifying addresses is not a problem, but having them adopted widely by the governments and citizens is.