Apple Acquires Waterloo-Based Startup Inductiv to Work on Siri, AI and More

Siri apple devices 2020

According to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, Apple has confirmed the acquisition of Waterloo, Ontario-based startup, Inductiv:

Apple Inc. bought machine-learning startup Inductiv Inc., adding to more than a dozen AI-related acquisitions by the technology giant in the past few years.

The engineering team from Waterloo, Ontario-based Inductiv joined Apple in recent weeks to work on Siri, machine learning and data science. Apple confirmed the deal, saying it “buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

University of Waterloo Computer Science Professor, Ihab Francis Ilyas, the co-founder of Inductiv, has already listed on his website the startup is “now part of Apple”.

Another member of the Inductiv team, Josh McGrath, a graduate researcher from the University of Waterloo, lists his current employment on LinkedIn as a Machine Learning Engineer for Apple, working full-time out of Seattle, in Washington State.

According to an interview with CS-Can/Info-Can back in March with IIyas, “Inductiv makes use of a new wave of a modern machine learning platform for predictions on structured data. The team recognized a market gap beyond data integration and beyond data quality – the ability to understand how structured data is generated and scalable engines that can abstract much of it at once. The new methods abstract most data problems as predictions on structured data, including cleaning, missing value imputation, error detection and prediction.”

Inductiv was founded by IIyas and two of his students, Theodoros Rekatsinas at the University of Wisconsin and Christopher Ré at Stanford University in 2019.

Let’s all cross our fingers Apple is going to give Siri the help she deserves. #prayforsiri

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