Maluuba is a Canadian technology company conducting research in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

and language understanding. Founded in 2011, the company was acquired by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

in 2017. In late March 2016, the company demonstrated a machine reading system capable of answering arbitrary questions about J.K Rowling’s ''

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone ''Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'' is a 1997 fantasy novel written by British author J. K. Rowling. The first novel in the ''Harry Potter'' series and Rowling's debut novel, it follows Harry Potter, a young wizard who discovers hi ...

''. Maluuba's natural language understanding technology is used by several consumer electronic brands for over 50 million devices.

History

Maluuba was founded by four undergraduate students from the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates ...

, Zhiyuan Wu, Joshua Pantony, Sam Pasupalak and Kaheer Suleman. Their initial proof of concept was a program that allowed users to search for flights using their voice. In February 2012, the company secured $2 million in seed funding from Samsung Ventures. Since 2013, Maluuba has partnered with several companies in the smart phone, smart TV, automotive and IoT space. In August 2015 Maluuba secured a $9 million of Series A investment from Nautilus Ventures and Emerllion Capital. Then in December 2015, Maluuba opened an R&D lab in

Montreal, Quebec Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple-pe ...

. By 2016 the company employed more than fifty people, and had published fifteen peer-reviewed research papers focused on language understanding. On January 13, 2017, Maluuba announced they had been acquired by Microsoft for $140M. In July 2017, according to the reports, Maluuba closed its Kitchener-Waterloo office and moved employees to its Montreal office.

Research

Maluuba's research centre opened in

in December 2015. The lab was advised by

Yoshua Bengio Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université ...

(University of Montreal) and Richard Sutton (University of Alberta). Prior to its acquisition by

, the lab published fifteen peer-reviewed papers. The lab also partnered with local universities:

University of Montreal A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, th ...

MILA lab and

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous ...

Machine reading comprehension (MRC)

In March 2016, Maluuba demonstrated their machine reading comprehension technology on the MCTest outperforming other word-matching approaches by 8% Maluuba continued their work on MRC throughout 2016. In June, the company demonstrated a program called EpiReader which outperformed Facebook and Google in machine comprehension tests. Several research teams were able to match Maluuba's results since the paper was released. EpiReader made use of two large datasets, the CNN/Daily Mail dataset released by Google DeepMind, comprising over 300,000 news articles; and the Children's Book Test, posted by Facebook Research, made up of 98 children’s books open sourced under Project Gutenberg. Following this achievement, the company released two natural language datasets: NewsQA, focused on comprehension and Frames, focused on Dialogue.

Dialogue systems

The company has published research findings into dialogue systems which comprises natural language understanding, state tracking, and

natural language generation Natural language generation (NLG) is a software process that produces natural language output. In one of the most widely-cited survey of NLG methods, NLG is characterized as "the subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics th ...

. Maluuba published a research paper learning dialogue policies with deep reinforcement learning. In 2016, Maluuba also freely released the Frames dataset, which is a large human-generated corpus of conversations.

Reinforcement learning

The company conducts research into

reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning concerned with how intelligent agents ought to take actions in an environment in order to maximize the notion of cumulative reward. Reinforcement learning is one of three basic machine ...

in which intelligent agents are motivated to take actions within a set environment in order to maximize a reward. The research team has also published several papers on scalability. In June 2017, the Maluuba team was the first to beat the game ''

Ms. Pac-Man is a 1982 maze arcade game developed by General Computer Corporation and published by Midway. It is the first sequel to '' Pac-Man'' (1980) and the first entry in the series to not be made by Namco. Controlling the title character, Pac-Man's ...

'' for the

Atari 2600 The Atari 2600, initially branded as the Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS) from its release until November 1982, is a home video game console developed and produced by Atari, Inc. Released in September 1977, it popularized microprocesso ...

system.

Applications

Numerous applications for Maluuba's technology have been proposed in industry with several applications being commercialized. One of the first applications of Maluuba's natural language technology has been the smartphone assistant. These systems allow users to speak to their phone and get direct results to their question (instead of merely seeing a sea of blue web links that point to possible answers to their question). The company raised $9M in 2015 to bring their voice assistant technology to automotive and IOT sectors.

References

External links

* {{Microsoft Companies established in 2011 Natural language processing software Microsoft acquisitions