It has already been a rocky year for Twitter Inc, especially with the recent departure of longtime CEO Dick Costolo. Despite continued problems with stagnant user growth and ongoing harassment issues, Twitter continues marching forward with new startup acquisitions, and today the company announced that it had acquired Cambridge-based startup Whetlab to “accelerate Twitter’s machine learning efforts.”

“Over the past year, we have created a technology to make machine learning better and faster for companies, automatically,” Whetlab said in an announcement on its website. “Twitter is the platform for open communication on the internet and we believe that Whetlab’s technology can have a great impact by accelerating Twitter’s internal machine learning efforts.”

Whetlab stated that it would be shutting down its closed beta on July 15, 2015, and the company directed beta participants to similar optimization tools like Spearmint, SMAC, and HyperOpt.

Optimizing performance with machine learning

Aside from accelerating its own machine learning, Twitter has not stated what exactly it plans to do with Whetlabs’ technology, but the startup’s website provides more detail on how exactly its service functions.

Whetlab automates the tuning of your favorite tool and optimizes its performance.

What “tool” you ask? Well, it could be a lot of things. It could be a piece of software, whose performance is controlled by a few parameters (such as a compression computer program or a machine learning algorithm), or it could even be a complicated physical process (such as the manufacture of a device or even a cooking recipe). As long as your tool has a few knobs which you can crank up or down in order to impact its performance, Whetlab can help you!

Whetlab works by suggesting tests you should run with your tool in order to improve it. Once you have the result of these tests, you tell Whetlab how they turned out and it will suggest new tests, and so on until you’re satisfied with the improved performance of your tool.

Twitter will be gaining all five team members from Whetlabs, including Ryan Adams, Hugo Larochelle, Jasper Snoek, Kevin Swersky and Alex Wiltschko. The cost of acquiring the startup has not been disclosed.

Photo by shawncampbell