Apple Buys TerraSwarm PI Carlos Guestrin's Startup Turi

Turi, an artificial intelligence startup founded by TerraSwarm PI Carlos Guestrin, has been acquired by Apple. News of the purchase appeared in several articles including the Wall Street Journal's, "Apple Buys Machine-Learning Startup Turi" and Geek Wire's "Exclusive: Apple acquires Turi in major exit for Seattle-based machine learning and AI startup."

Turi enables companies to make sense of data, offering a software platform that helps them develop and manage applications with machine learning capabilities. It allows developers to detect fraud, create recommendation engines, analyze customer data, and target potential customers.

Carlos Guestrin, the Amazon.com Associate Professor of Machine Learning at the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University of Washington, founded Turi in 2013. Formerly GraphLab and Dato, the startup adopted it's current name in July. The name is a reference to software creation techniques that rely on computers making inferences from data to essentially teach themselves without specific instructions.

Apple uses machine learning in predicting word completion in messages, photo facial recognition, and applications such as Siri. It's acquisition of Turi is seen as part of a larger push by Apple into artificial intelligence and machine learning.