
Apple Machine Learning Journal - uptown
https://machinelearning.apple.com/
======
exhilaration
For anyone curious about why Apple is allowing its researchers to
(anonymously) publish papers like these on an Apple blog, it's because of
this:

 _Apple’s director of AI research Russ Salakhutdinov has announced at a
conference that the company’s machine-learning researchers will be free to
publish their findings. This is an apparent reversal of Apple 's previous
position._

 _Refusing permission to publish was said to be keeping the company out of the
loop and meaning that the best people in the field didn’t want to work for
Apple._

From: [https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/06/apple-ai-researchers-can-
publ...](https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/06/apple-ai-researchers-can-publish/)

We will see whether this move is sufficient to attract the top talent they're
looking for.

~~~
andyjohnson0
I wonder - is there really any prestige to be had from publishing anonymously?

~~~
throwaway91111
Who the hell publishes for prestige? Most people won't be able to understand,
let alone care, about your research.

~~~
freyir
> _Most people won 't be able to understand, let alone care, about your
> research?_

The intended audience is other researchers in your field, not the general
public.

Your reputation as an academic or researcher rest on your publication record
(plus your ability to land funding). If you publish highly-cited papers in
prestigious journals or conference proceedings, you're considered among the
best in your field. This opens the door to promotions, better job offers, etc.

Researchers at Apple have historically forgone the ability to publish. They
have no reputation in the field. This significantly harms their ability to get
a job elsewhere as a researcher.

------
skywhopper
Is anyone else amused by the irony of using machine-learning-trained image
generator in order to provide data to a machine-learning-trained image
recognition program? I'm sure the researchers themselves and plenty of people
here could come up with all sorts of logical reasons why this is fine, and
very possibly given the right protocols it would be fine. But this sort of
approach seems to lend itself toward increasing the risks of machine-learning.
ie, you're doubling down on poor assumptions that are built-in to your
training criteria or which creep into the neural net implicitly, because you
are using the same potentially flawed assumptions on both ends of the process.
Even if that's not the case, by using less real, accurately annotated data,
you're far less likely to address true edge cases, and far more likely to
overestimate the validity of the judgments of the final product compared to
one with less synthetic training. And if there's one thing the machine
learning community doesn't need any more of, it's overconfidence.

Edit: oops, turns out I mistakenly responded to the content of the paper
instead of the fact that it exists and the form of its existence. Sorry.

~~~
SophosQ
I cannot disagree with you but the fact is and remains that the field is a
budding one and this is but a building block towards better understanding the
nature of using sets of geometric transformations for pattern recognition in
A.I.

If this was to be directly implemented in the real world your arguments would
need to be addressed, however I'm certain this research paper wouldn't be
abused in that manner.

Disclaimer: I'm a graduate student studying Computer Vision.

------
Stasis5001
A lot of academic papers actually aren't all that great, for a variety of
reasons. Normally, you can use citations, journal, and author credentials to
get a sense of whether a paper is even worth skimming. The only "paper" on the
"journal" right now looks like it's just a watered-down, html-only version of
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.07828](https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.07828)!

Seems like more of a PR stunt than anything useful, but who knows.

~~~
egyptiankarim
But in the sense that Apple is notoriously tight-lipped about research, it's a
notable PR stunt. Unlike with Microsoft and Google, you don't see a lot of
Apple in academic research circles despite them having a significant brain-
share. Love them or hate them, Apple is a powerhouse and the (undoubtedly
amazing) research happening behind the scenes could do a huge amount of good
with just a bit more visibility.

------
zo7
It's interesting how much criticism they're getting because Apple formatted
their blog to be anonymous and watered down, but they're clear in their first
technical post that it is just an overview of work that the researchers are
presenting at CVPR [1].

So the researchers at Apple are still getting credit for their work in the
scientific community, but the PR-facing side of their work is anonymous,
probably for some aesthetic reason (this _is_ Apple, of course)

[1]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.07828](https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.07828)

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ericzawo
The most Apple thing ever is that they called it a "journal" and not a "blog."

~~~
Waterluvian
I'm only 30 and yet I think I've become an old "get off my lawn" man. I hate
the word "blog" and find "journal" to be a nice relief. No need to
differentiate your log/journal from others because its on the web. It feels
like a language artifact of the dot com era alongside "surfing" and "cyber".

~~~
sithadmin
This isn't a 'journal' in any sense of what the word implies when referring to
published materials. There's no peer review, probably no editorial board. Blog
is appropriate.

~~~
taco_emoji
Nobody called it _scientific_ journal.

[http://www.dictionary.com/browse/journal](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/journal):

1\. a daily record, as of occurrences, experiences, or observations[...]

3\. a periodical or magazine, especially one published for a special group,
learned society, or profession[...]

4\. a record, usually daily, of the proceedings and transactions of a
legislative body, an organization, etc.

~~~
_delirium
The phrase "machine learning journal" strongly implies academic journal to
most machine learning researchers though, in part because that is actually in
the name of several journals in the field. I don't think Apple is unaware of
that either. This reads to me as quite deliberately playing on that
association, to upgrade the prestige of the stuff published here vs. what it'd
have if it were just a blog.

~~~
dgacmu
The first post is actually a summary of a CVPR paper by Apple employees. For
those not familiar with it, CVPR is a top conference in computer vision.[0]
Recall, of course, that "conference" for much of computer science implies the
same length and degree of peer review as "journal" does in non-CS fields.

[0] [http://cvpr2017.thecvf.com/](http://cvpr2017.thecvf.com/)

~~~
wuliwong
I don't think that really matters. If I only post really worthy articles in my
blog it doesn't become a scientific journal. I'm not saying that I believe
peer-reviewed journals are the end-all-be-all for science but it does seem
like Apple is being misleading with this.

edit----------

Although, a company publishing a peer-reviewed scientific journal like Nature
would be surprising. So maybe that isn't the common interpretation when they
see the title. Maybe it isn't totally misleading. I guess I'm split on it. :)

~~~
_delirium
It's not _common_ , but also not unheard of for companies to organize properly
peer-reviewed journals for their internal research. The two most famous are
probably the _Bell System Technical Journal_ and the _IBM Journal of Research
and Development_. From the title I was expecting Apple to be continuing in
that tradition, but it seems they aren't.

------
KKKKkkkk1
Why no author names on the article?

~~~
rrmm
This sort of thing has actually been dealt with in the past. In 1908, William
Gosset working for Guinness brewery in Dublin, published his statistical work
under the pen name of "Student." Which gave us the oddly named "Student's
t-test," and related distributions.

~~~
rayuela
I don't know how I never knew this fact, but this is pretty hilarious!

------
bschwindHN
Going off on a bit of a tangent, but I feel like Apple's niche in AI will be
with on-device processing. The iPhone 7 already has an FPGA onboard, and I
would guess the next iPhone will have more/more powerful chips. Training would
probably still have to happen on their servers though due to the dataset sizes
needed. I might just be full of shit though, I'm not much of an AI developer.

------
tedmiston
The top comment on Product Hunt from Ryan Hoover raised a good point about
Apple's timing with this:

> This launch is particularly interesting because this isn't typical for
> Apple, a fairly secretive and top down company (when it comes to external
> communications). Timing makes a lot of sense with their upcoming launch of
> ARkit, Apple Home, and the inevitable "Siri 2.0", among other things.

[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/apple-machine-learning-
jou...](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/apple-machine-learning-journal)

~~~
minimaxir
This blog is not Apple's first blog; they started a Swift blog shortly after
the release of Swift:
[https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/](https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/)

~~~
kalleboo
And WebKit has has a blog for 11 years now [https://webkit.org/blog/4/welcome-
to-the-webkit-blog/](https://webkit.org/blog/4/welcome-to-the-webkit-blog/)

------
pseudometa
I would really like to see the names of people who are working on the
research. They reference other papers and give their authors credit, but was
disappointed to not see the Apple employees get credit.

------
Angostura
I'll be keeping an eye out for acrostics with the author's name.

~~~
mcphage
I'm not sure what you mean? Their names are Shrivastava, Pfister, Tuzel,
Susskind, Wang, Webb. What are you expecting to find?

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mattl
What's powering this site? Doesn't look like WebObjects.

~~~
tambourine_man
Looks like it's Jekyll

[http://www.manton.org/2017/07/5463.html](http://www.manton.org/2017/07/5463.html)

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acdha
I really wish this had an Atom or RSS feed

~~~
matt4077
It does:
[https://machinelearning.apple.com/feed.xml](https://machinelearning.apple.com/feed.xml)

It's "just" not referenced in the source.

I get that social networks are the tool of choice to prioritise articles from
the major news outlets–if The Atlantic publishes something spectacular, it
will find me.

But how on earth am I supposed to follow something like this, when I have to
guess randomly to even find a feed? Are they expecting me to bookmark it and
check for news once a week? There's no Twitter account, newsletter signup,
Facebook link... nothing.

~~~
acdha
So I just got an email back from them and they're going to look into adding
it. I really like that tone of interaction, too.

------
0xCMP
So we're def getting some form of facial recognition in the new iPhone with
stuff like this being published.

Feels like an early post to show they've done some advanced work in making
sure you can't trick them.

~~~
haikuginger
There's already facial recognition in the iPhone - it's used in the photo app
to let you sort through photos of different people.

Wouldn't be surprised to see it more in use, though.

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plg
I like the font. Is is possible/legal to use the SF Pro Text webfont?

PS I know the desktop font is available for download at the apple developer
site ... but I'm talking about the web font

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mrkrabo
No <title>?

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dekhn
calling this a "journal" and making it anonymous is disingenuous.

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gjvc
I'm betting that sjobs would not have approved this

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joshdance
Surprising. Hopefully we see more of this.

