Apple launches an online journal focused on machine learning

Apple has launched a new blog- Machine Learning Journal, for highlighting its research in the area of artificial intelligence. The Cupertino giant plans to publish academic-style papers looking at new applications and techniques in machine learning. "Here, you can read posts written by Apple engineers about their work using machine learning technologies to help build innovative products for millions of people around the world," the introductory blog post states .

At the moment there's only one post on the site titled 'Improving the Realism of Synthetic Images' that shares insights about improving picture based machine learning models without gathering additional training data manually.

The post is quite lengthy, technical with quite a few descriptive figures, graphs and GIFs mixed in.

The blog is an interesting development from many angles. Firstly, Apple has always been a secretive company that shares little about its research projects. Also, Apple has often been criticized for its slow pace in the area of machine learning where companies like Google and Amazon are seen as more competent.

Apple tells its readers to email the company in its debut post. There's also a link in the footer to look at job openings at Apple. Apple surely plans to use this platform to find promising engineers in that field. The blog, however, does not say how Apple is going to integrate these learnings into its products and services.

Apple says that the site will be updated throughout the year. It is unclear how frequently Apple will post updates on the website. And it has not provided an RSS feed for the site. Apple is open to feedback and comments from interested parties, just send your comments and queries to machine-learning@apple.com.