• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, September 22, 2016

Apple opened a development office in Hyderabad, India earlier this year. Coincidence or not, Tuplejump was founded in Hyderabad, in 2013.

While the space remains highly experimental, Apple and other tech giants already use machine learning to speed up searches and classify images and facial recognition, among other tasks.

At the moment, it is not clear what Apple plans to do with Tuplejump's software, which is most commonly used to process, visualize and store data.

Most recently, Apple dropped a reported $200 million on machine learning and artificial intelligence startup Turi, a Seattle-based company that has created a software platform for other companies to build apps that utilize machine learning and AI.

Customers have used the platform to build recommendation engines and fraud detectors, as well as apps that predict customer churn, run sentiment analysis, and segment customers.

Seattle is apparently a hub for the burgeoning machine-learning industry, with several companies in the space headquartered there. It’s not surprising that Apple has been building up a presence in the Northwest -- after buying Union Bay Networks in 2014, the company opened an engineering office in Seattle. 

Previously, Apple purchased Perceptio and VocalIq.

Following a similar path, Facebook opened an AI research lab in Paris last year. Like its existing AI teams in Menlo Park, New York and London, the Paris hub is tackling long-term research projects in image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition and the kinds of physical and logical infrastructure required to run these systems.

Google and Yahoo have also endeavored to harness deep learning to enhance their services. Futurist and AI expert Ray Kurzweil joined Google in 2013 after Larry Page convinced him to explore concepts in his book “How To Create A Mind.”