Apple Announces New AI and Machine Learning Residency Program
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Apple Announces New AI and Machine Learning Residency Program

Giant tech  company, Apple, has announced a new residency program which has been designed so as to encourage experts to apply their knowledge in a building machine-learning and AI-powered products. As the well known company continues with researching on how to implement artificial intelligence and machine learning on its devices, the company’s interest in recruiting new talent has grown.

Apple already produces chips that perform certain AI tasks like recognizing the phrase “Hey, Siri.” and announced a great deal of new features during this year’s World Wide Developers Conference. The tech giant introduced features like facial recognition for HomeKit, native sleep tracking for the Apple Watch, handwriting recognition for iPad, and more.

Apple AI/ML research in academia lead, Michael Rennaker, manager of Apple in Research Academia (ARIA), was excited to announce the new initiative on Twitter: ‘’Thrilled to announce a new program created to help experts in applied fields build ML-powered products and experiences.’’ Immediately after that tweet, he continued to cordially encourage experts in various fields outside of AI to apply, by stating the following: ‘’ If you have expertise in field outside of AI, can code, and want to dip your toe into the world of Machine Learning, we’ve created this program just for you! Job postings are up, starting Summer of 2021.’’

As it can be understood from this announcement, Apple’s Machine Learning Research group launched a new residency program that invites experts in various fields to apply their expertise in order to build new ML and AI-powered products and experiences.

Apple’s Machine Learning Research website explains that the year-long program aims to invest in the resident’s technical and theoretical machine learning development, and help advance their professional careers.

The program is open to residents with STEM graduate degrees, or equivalent industry experience, software development backgrounds, and niche expertise — such as neuroscience, design, linguistics, or psychology.”

Residents will have the unique opportunity to attend special, personalized machine learning and AI courses and learn from an Apple mentor closely involved in their program. In addition, they will collaborate with fellow multi-talented residents and gain valuable experience by working on high-impact projects with our machine learning teams. People are encouraged to take their change as Apple company is openly seeking to recruit USA and European candidates with niche expertise for AI/ML residency program, promising immersion and mentoring that will advance their careers.

In order to learn more about the fields of study that qualify, as well as other job requirements for the residency program, interested readers and potential candidates should check out Apple’s list of job postings, which begins in the summer of 2021. Locations for the openings are Seattle, Cambridge, Zurich, Cupertino, and various locations within Germany. In Cambridge, candidates are granted the chance to work on Apple’s virtual personal assistant Siri. However,  candidates from other cities will have opportunities to learn in other AI/ML fields.

Each residency will begin with a machine and deep learning coursework, before they move into machine learning projects, potentially with the possibility to present the work at an academic conference.

The goal is apparently to find people whose interests aren’t necessarily AI/ML specific, then give them the knowledge and tools to apply machine learning and deep learning to their disciplines. This process will definitely widen Apple’s ability to solve users’ problems in those disciplines.

As mentioned above, no start date has been specified as yet, but the program is planned to run from summer 2021 and last for one year.