Twitter Buys Image Search Startup ‘Madbits’

    Twitter has acquired Madbits, a start-up based on deep-learning technology on 28 July 2014. The amount was not disclosed. Madbits co-founders Clement Farabet and Louis-Alexandre Etezad-Heydari revealed that they had accepted Twitter’s offer and sold their company to Twitter.

    On their official website, Madbits gave a brief description about their deep-learning based technology and also why they decided to agree to Twitter’s proposal:

    “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.”

    Also on their LinkedIn profile, they say that their team is “primarily interested in the task of image search, and the creation of intelligent, dynamic image sets, to automatically organize large databases of images.”

    Deep learning technology has improved over the past years and finds application in computer vision, speech recognition and text analysis. Major companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook already employ deep learning technology that has developed over the years.

    Google, Yahoo and Dropbox also made similar deep-learning based acquisitions.  With the number of images being published on twitter increases day by day this super technology will help the micro-blogging site tremendously. It will be able to add image search function, and also analyze pictures and see what people are tweeting about. This acquisition would help to improve their ranking as well. Financial details about the acquisition have not been yet revealed. 

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Khurshid Kamar

    Khurshid Kamar is a student of Computer Science Engineering who has merged his
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