Google Buys Machine Learning Startup Moodstocks

Google has acquired Paris-based machine learning startup Moodstocks as part of its ongoing effort to improve visual recognition technology.

Google is adding to its already substantial set of machine learning technologies with the acquisition of a French company called Moodstocks, a visual recognition machine learning technology company.

Object recognition is one of the more difficult problems for machine learning, and it's a problem that Google has been working on for a while.

In a blog post announcing the deal, Google noted that many of its services including Google Translate and Smart Reply Inbox already rely on machine learning technologies. The addition of Moodstock will help with visual recognition.

Vincent Simonet, head of the R&D Center of Google France wrote in the blog post that Google has made great strides in terms of visual recognition technology -- for instance, if you search the word "party" or "beach" you'll get a good image match.

"But there is still much to do in this area," he wrote (as translated from French to English by Google Translate), and that's where Moodstocks comes in.