Apple acquires “dark data” startup Lattice

Apple has acquired data mining and machine learning company Lattice, co-founded by Michael Cafarella, a professor of computer science at U-M, and Chris Re, a professor of computer science at Stanford. (Cafarella was the co-creator of Hadoop, a widely used big data processing technology.) According to the Lattice website, the startup was born out of a Stanford research project called DeepDive. The company’s technology uses machine learning to parse through databases or the web to answer queries. The Deep Dive program is able to understand “dark data,” which provides information within images or illustrations.