Twitter has acquired a stealthy image search startup called Madbits. It was founded by former New York University researchers. Clément Farabet and Louis-Alexandre Etezad-Heydari. Farabet is a protégé of Facebook AI Lab director and New York University professor Yann LeCun, while Etezad-Heydari was advised by Larry Maloney and Eero Simoncelli.
For the acquisition, the co-founders said:
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."
Madbits work primarily involved in the task of image search, and the creation of intelligent, dynamic image sets, to automatically organize large databases of images.
