In May 2017 Apple acquired Lattice Data -- a company that applies an AI-enabled inference engine to take unstructured, dark data and turn it into structured (and more usable) information. Lattice came out of the Stanford research project designated DeepDive, a framework for statistical inference. Lattice personnel had been the researchers and creators behind DeepDive, and formed Lattice build on top of that achievement to create products for industry and government. Their mission had been to unlock the value in dark data for critical real-world problems. What is Dark data? The connected, digital world produces data at an accelerating rate with IBM estimating that 90 percent of the data in existence today was produced in the last two years. Estimates are that 70%-80% of that data is 'dark' - unstructured and largely unusable when it comes to processing and analytics. Lattice uses machine learning to essentially put that data into order and to make it more usable in a wide range of endeavor: international policing and crime solving; medical research; paleontological investigation.
