Apple has published its first ever open access research paper and it is on an improved form of machine learning, or AI, that Apple calls Simulated+Unsupervised (S+U) learning. The computer programme generates more photorealistic images of the human eye by learning from a large dataset of real images of eyes in order to tweak synthetic eyes just enough that they transform from what look like those of computer game characters to the real thing.
This research is important because it can be used to better train image recognition algorithms to track eye movements, which is important for virtual reality and future computer interfaces. However, the real milestone is how open and collaborative this research is: for a company traditionally quite secretive about its research and development, Apple has now published its data in an open access paper, using datasets from the University of Cambridge and the Max Plank Institute for Informatics.
