Apple confirms attendance at NeurIPS machine learning conference in Canada

Apple has confirmed it will be making an appearance at the 32nd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in Montreal, Canada, starting from December 2, with machine learning experts from the company in attendance to discuss related technologies, as well as to potentially hire more to further its own work.

Posted to Apple's Machine Learning Journal, the notice advises the iPhone producer will be staffing a booth at the conference, also known as NeurIPS or NIPS, with experts in the field of machine learning. It is advised the booth will be open to visit by attendees throughout the conference, and invites participants at the event to drop by and have a chat.

While the conference booth and invitation to attendees is likely to help Apple ingratiate itself further with the community, the second half of the note strongly suggests Apple intends to use the opportunity to attract new talent to its ranks.

"Apple is dedicated to advancing state-of-the-art machine learning technologies," the note states. "As part of this, we're building a team of exceptional researchers and engineers who can infuse intelligence into our devices and services to touch the lives of millions of users every day."

The message goes on to advise Apple is "looking for people with backgrounds in various areas of machine learning," and suggests interested parties should look at the company's jobs board for positions in that area.

Apple's endeavors in machine learning cover a wide number of areas, including the infrastructure to support machine learning projects, deep and reinforcement learning, speech recognition, natural language understanding, and computer vision, among others. While some of Apple's work is easy to spot, such as the well-known Siri and Project Titan's self-driving vehicle system, it also applies to other not-so-obvious areas, like recommendations in Apple Music or subject identification in the Photos app.

At last year's event, Apple offered a glimpse into the company's self-driving platform, including computer vision and dynamic decision making processes.

The company is also actively expanding its teams with new hires and acquisitions, like October's purchase of machine learning AR firm Spektral.