Twitter’s acquisition of machine-learning startup will sharpen videos in real-time

Twitter has announced about its acquisition of a London-based company – Magic Pony Technology that has developed machine-learning techniques for visual processing which can automatically sharpen and add detail into a low-resolution and blurry footage in a video in real time.

Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO, shared about the news via a tweet while believing that the development will help them achieve the goal of “making Twitter the first and best place to see what’s happening in the world, and talk about it, live!”

Magic Pony have been developing machine learning based techniques for visual processing on web, desktop and mobile over the past 18 months. The company has also filed over 20 international patents and has been publishing at top conferences already.

“Today we’re excited to announce that we’re joining forces with Twitter to use our technology to improve the visual experiences that are delivered across their apps.” – states Magic Pony

Earlier this year, Magic Pony revealed a part of its machine-learning research that how their algorithms can sharpen up and improve low-resolution videos with blurry footage and poor quality in real time.

Live video game feed shows how blurred footage can be sharpen up in real time by the system in subject. – MIT Technology Review

While speaking to MIT Technology Review in April, Magic Pony co-founder, Rob Bishop stated “Online video-streaming businesses rely heavily on video compression,” he said “Our first product demonstrates that image quality can be greatly enhanced using deep learning, and fast mobile GPUs now allow us to deploy it anywhere.”

Magic Pony’s algorithms can sharpen up a pixelated character – MIT Technology Review

Magic Pony is not the first company Twitter has invested to acquire machine learning capabilities, Madbits was the first in 2014 and then Whetlab in 2015, Twitter acquired. Following the recent acquisition, the team from Magic Pony will join the team of engineers, data scientists and machine learning researchers at Twitter.

In an announcement over at Magic Pony’s website, the team has disclosed that they will function as “the European home base for Twitter’s machine learning efforts,” they also added “We’ve barely scratched the surface of what we think is possible in this area and are excited to see what the future holds.” As the team working together with twitter, they are expecting to have accelerated their rate of research on machine learning and.