Apple Machine Learning research website will talk about the company’s work in this area.
Apple has launched its Apple Machine Learning Journal website, a first of its kind for the company where it will post about research it is doing on the area. Now this is an unusual step for Apple, which is known for its secrecy around research and any other products they might be working on for the future. But in an age where machine learning has become the buzzword and companies like Google, Microsoft openly post their research, it looks like Apple wants to signal that they too are not behind.
Apple’s machine learning website has an introductory post, which says that readers can get more details about “posts written by Apple engineers about their work using machine learning technologies.” Interestingly the welcome post also encourages machine learning researchers, students working on the topic, or engineers, developers with expertise in the area to send questions, feedback to Apple. The website mentions machine-learning@apple.com as the email address where people can send their responses, feedback.
The Cupertino-based technology giant has also put out a research paper on the website talking about how they are training neural networks to understand images and objects better. The paper highlights how Apple is relying on synthetically created images to train these machine learning systems, rather than create big, expensive libraries of images. The research paper explains how they have tried to make these images look as close to real ones as possible, and how it was a cheaper, faster way of training the machine system.
The Apple Machine Learning blog comes at a time, when rivals Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are all seen as being ahead of the curve compared to Cupertino. The blog also has a prominent link about job openings at the company. But it looks like Apple wants to make itself seen in the Machine Learning and AI space.
Also read: Apple iPad Pro (10.5-inch) first impressions: Can this replace the laptop?
Apple recently hired Russ Salakhutdinov, who is a prominent artificial intelligence researcher from Carnegie Mellon University. He joined the company as director of AI research, and also posted about how Apple is looking experts in the field of machine learning. The company has also acquired a startup called Turi Inc as well, which has a focus on AI and machine learning.
Earlier the BackChannel had done an extensive story on how Apple views machine learning and artificial intelligence, which highlighted that Cupertino has not been ignoring this area. Also Apple has been vocal about the challenges with implementing AI, machine learning on devices, while keeping user privacy intact.
