Twitter has acquired a stealthy computer vision startup called Madbits, which was founded by former New York University researchers. Clément Farabet and Louis-Alexandre Etezad-Heydari. Farabet is a protégé of Facebook AI Lab director and New York University professor Yann LeCun, while Etezad-Heydari was advised by Larry Maloney and Eero Simoncelli. The notice on the Madbits website, which is dated Monday, is light on detail about the company’s technology, but includes this brief explanation of what it was doing and why it decided to accept Twitter’s offer: “Over this past year, we’ve built visual intelligence technology that automatically understands, organizes and extracts relevant information from raw media. Understanding the content of an image, whether or not there are tags associated with that image, is a complex challenge.”