Word is that Snapchat, the Los Angeles based photo messaging application, is preparing a foray into a very hot branch of artificial intellligence – deep learning.
Citing a knowledgeable source, VentureBeat reveals that the popular app, with an interest in deep learning has been developing a research team “to run sophisticated algorithms on user data like images and videos.”
“They’ll be doing deep learning analysis for images and eventually video (the latter, initially, probably just frame by frame rather than taking into account the full temporal nature of the visual data, and the audio stream),” the source wrote to VentureBeat in an email.
Snapchat, as it turns out, brought in Yahoo’s senior research scientist, Jia Li as head of research and Google’s Wenze Hu as a research scientist, both individuals proficient in computer vision, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Other positions for a research scientist, a research engineer, and an engineer for special projects remain open, as made evident on their website.
Founded in 2011, Snapchat, however, isn’t the first to tread DL territory with predecessors like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Paypal and Twitter already experimenting, not to mention, even startups such as Clarifai and music-streaming companies like Pandora and Spotify.
Photo credit: pestoverde / Foter / CC BY
