SAN FRANCISCO, June 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Twitter today
announced it has acquired Magic Pony Technology, a London-based developer of machine learning and
visual processing technology, expanding the machine learning
capabilities in Twitter's video technology and adding valuable
talent to the company's Cortex team.
"Machine learning is increasingly at the core of everything we
build at Twitter," said Jack Dorsey,
Twitter CEO and co-founder. "Magic Pony's machine learning
technology will help us build strength into our deep learning teams
with world-class talent, so Twitter can continue to be the best
place to see what's happening and why it matters, first. We value
deep learning research to help make our world better, and we will
keep doing our part to share our work and learnings with the
community."
"Our team has researched and developed state-of-the-art machine
learning techniques for visual processing that can identify the
features of imagery and use that information to process it in new
ways," said Rob Bishop, Magic Pony
CEO and co-founder. "Joining forces with Twitter gives us the
opportunity to bring the benefits of that research to hundreds of
millions of people around the world, and allows Magic Pony to
contribute to better quality viewing experiences on Twitter."
Magic Pony's interdisciplinary team includes 11 PhDs and alumni
of some of the top labs in the world with expertise across computer
vision, machine learning, high-performance computing, and
computational neuroscience. Bishop will be based out of Twitter's
headquarters in San Francisco, and
co-founder Zehan Wang and the other
members will join Twitter's growing London office.
"London is an important
engineering center for us, responsible for some of our highest
priority product work, like live video," said Jeremy Rishel, Twitter VP of Engineering. "The
Magic Pony team there will serve as the European base of the
Twitter Cortex team and help recruit more top talent from the
region."
Today's acquisition builds on Twitter's investment in machine
learning, beginning with the acquisitions of Madbits in
July 2014 and Whetlab in June 2015. Magic Pony's team will be joining
Twitter Cortex, a team of engineers, data scientists, and machine
learning researchers dedicated to building a product in which
people can easily find new experiences to share and participate
in.
About Twitter
Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) is an iconic
service and global platform for self-expression and live
conversation. Twitter has always been the best place to see what's
happening now. Whether it's breaking news, entertainment, sports,
or everyday topics, only Twitter lets you connect with people
anywhere in the world with live conversation. Anything that
happens, you see it first on Twitter. By developing a fundamentally
new way for people to consume, create, distribute, and discover
content, Twitter enables any voice to echo around the world
instantly and unfiltered. Twitter is available in more than 40
languages around the world. The service can be accessed at
Twitter.com, on a variety of mobile devices and via SMS. For more
information, visit about.twitter.com or follow @twitter.
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SOURCE Twitter, Inc.