Apple publishes its Machine Learning Journal to foster AI lore

20 Jul 2017

Image: maxuser/Shutterstock

Hmmm … Apple doesn’t normally talk about its research projects.

Apple has taken the unprecedented step of opening up about its research in the area of machine learning.

Well, opening up is a bit of a stretch but the company doesn’t normally do this kind of thing either.

The Machine Learning Journal is a blog focused on machine learning papers and sharing Apple’s findings.

There is currently only one post up (at the time of writing), focused on turning synthetic images into real ones in order to train neural networks.

But it’s a start and maybe it could be the beginning of a new open research culture at Apple, which is usually notorious for its cult of secrecy.

If anything, the detail in the first post, ‘Improving the Realism of Synthetic Images’, gives an insight into the regimen at Apple and how it goes about creating technologies, securing patents and developing intellectual property.

An interesting development indeed.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com