Apple has scooped up Lattice Data, a company that applies an AI enabled inference engine to take unstructured, “dark” data and turn it into structured (and more usable) information for about $200 million, according to TechCrunch.
The deal was closed a couple of weeks ago, and about 20 engineers have joined the larger company, the article adds. Lattice was born out of the Stanford research project DeepDive, a framework for statistical inference. The company is comprised of the researchers and creators behind DeepDive, and they build on top of DeepDive to create products for industry and government. Their mission is to unlock the value in dark data for critical real-world problems.
Like dark matter, dark data is the mass of data buried in text, tables, figures, and images, which lacks structure and so is, essentially, unprocessable by existing software. DeepDive is used to extract sophisticated relationships between entities and make inferences about facts involving those entities.
