“Apple has acquired Lattice Data, a Menlo Park company that was spun out of a Stanford research project called DeepDive in 2015,” Cromwell Schubarth reports for The Silicon Valley Business Journal.
“TechCrunch cited unnamed sources over the weekend who said the deal was done two weeks ago and that the price paid by Apple was around $200 million,” Schubarth reports. “The Cupertino tech giant later confirmed the acquisition to Fortune.”
“Lattice Data on its website said that it aims to ‘unlock the value in dark data for critical real-world problems,'” Schubarth reports. “One of the applications that Lattice had reportedly explored included enhancing AI assistants, including Amazon’s Alexa and Samsung’s Bixby.”
Read more in the full article here.
“What exactly is dark data? Our connected, digital world is producing data at an accelerated pace: there were 4.4 zettabytes of data in 2013, and that’s projected to grow to 44 zettabytes by 2020, and IBM estimates that 90 percent of the data in existence today was produced in the last two years,” Ingrid Lunden reports for TechCrunch.
“But between 70 and 80 percent of that data is unstructured — that is, ‘dark’ — and therefore largely unusable when it comes to processing and analytics,” Lunden reports. “Lattice uses machine learning to essentially put that data into order and to make it more usable.”
Lunden reports, “Think of it in terms of a jumble of data without labels, categorization or a sense of context — but with a certain latent value that could be unlocked with proper organization.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Differential privacy, among other applications.
Wonder what type of data they are collecting to reorganize into useable spreadsheet format, complete with pivot tables. Nefarious and Googleesque, or nobly saving the world?
In the meantime, where is my 2017 Mac Pro?
I think of this as another form of scouring, which is certainly the financial and marketing strategy of our current era. But big fish are all gone. Use finer nets to catch the little fish.
The end result of this strategy of course is… Soylent Green. Eating ourselves. When there’s nothing left but the starving billions, why not eat the very best? Babies.
Conclusion: Protect Your Privacy, or you’ll be someone’s lunch.
Tor
VPN
DNSCrypt
Cookie
LavaBit
…Etc…
“Over time, the more that Android versions age out, you’re going to have an increasing attack surface for bad guys,” said Josh Feinblum and Apple wants to take Dark Data But I don’t understand Why does Apple want to take dark data?