★ Apple Acquires Dark Data Analysis Company Lattice Data, Reportedly for $200m (May 15, 2017)
It emerged over the weekend that Apple has acquired Lattice Data, a company which specializes in analyzing unstructured data like text and images to create structured data (i.e. SQL database tables) which can then be analyzed by other computer programs or human beings. TechCrunch has a single source which puts the price paid at $200 million, and Apple has issued its usual generic statement confirming the acquisition but offering no further details. It’s worth briefly comparing the acquisition to Google’s of DeepMind in 2014: that buy was said to cost $500 million and was for 75 employees including several high profile AI experts, though it was unclear to outside observers exactly what it was working on, while this one reportedly brought 20 engineers to Apple and has several existing public applications and projects to point to. Lattice is the commercialized version of Stanford’s DeepDive project, which has already been used for a number of applications involving large existing but unstructured data sets. Lattice has a technique called Distant Supervision which it claims obviates the need for human training and instead relies on existing databases to establish links between items that can be used as a model for determining additional links in new data sets. It’s not clear to me whether the leader of the DeepDive team at Stanford, Christopher Ré, is joining Apple, but he was a MacArthur Genius Grant winner in 2015 and this video from MacArthur is a great summary of the work DeepDive does (there’s also a 30-minute talk by Ré on the DeepDive tech). Seeing Apple make an acquisition of this scale in AI is an indication that, despite not making lots of noise about its AI ambitions publicly, it really is serious about the field and wants to do better at parsing the data at its disposal to create new features and capabilities in its products. It’s entirely possible that we’ll never know exactly how this technology gets used at Apple, but it’s also possible that a year from now at WWDC we hear about some of the techniques Lattice has brought to Apple and applied to some of its products. Interestingly, the code for DeepDive and related projects is open source and available on GitHub, so I’m guessing Apple is acquiring the ability to make further advances in this area as much as the technology in its current form.
via TechCrunch
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