Twitter Acquires Machine Learning Company Madbits

Twitter has made another acquisition, picking up Madbits, which specializes in deep learning/machine learning, and has been working on technologies that can help extract information from raw media, su...
Twitter Acquires Machine Learning Company Madbits
Written by Chris Crum
  • Twitter has made another acquisition, picking up Madbits, which specializes in deep learning/machine learning, and has been working on technologies that can help extract information from raw media, such as images.

    This is the kind of thing that a company like Twitter could obviously put to good use with the amount of such raw media that saturates the service every day, or every second for that matter.

    Madbits talks about joining Twitter on its site (via GigaOm, which first reported on the acquisition).

    Over this past year, we’ve built visual intelligence technology that automatically understands, organizes and extracts relevant information from raw media. Understanding the content of an image, whether or not there are tags associated with that image, is a complex challenge. We developed our technology based on deep learning, an approach to statistical machine learning that involves stacking simple projections to form powerful hierarchical models of a signal.

    We prototyped and tested about ten different applications, and as we’ve prepared to launch publicly, we’ve decided to bring the technology to Twitter, a company that shares our ambitions and vision and will help us scale this technology.

    We are excited to join the folks at Twitter to merge our efforts and see this technology grow to its full potential.

    Twitter also mentioned on its earnings call on Tuesday that it has completed its previously announced acquisition of Tap Commerce. The company also announced a couple weeks ago that it has acquired CardSpring.

    Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    Image via Twitter

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