Category: Enterprise

NVIDIA expands DLI offerings

Booz Allen Hamilton

The need for deep learning skills is increasing as more and more companies and industries hop on the bandwagon. Launch a little more than a year ago, NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute (DLI) has already trained tens of thousands of students, developers and data scientists.

And the company is expanding its DLI offerings with:

  • New partnerships: Team up with Booz Allen Hamilton and deeplearning.ai to train thousands of students, developers and government specialists in artificial intelligence (AI).
  • New University Ambassador Program: Instructors worldwide can teach students critical job skills and practical applications of AI at no cost.
  • New courses:  More courses are added to teach domain-specific applications of deep learning for finance, natural language processing, robotics, video analytics, and self-driving cars.

Singapore’s AI agenda gets double boost!

NVIDIA Fellow Dr David Kirk
NVIDIA Fellow Dr David Kirk delivers the keynote address at the NVIDIA AI Conference.

Singapore’s aim to be an artificial intelligence (AI) hub has been boosted with two initiatives — the setting up of a shared AI platform for researchers and the awarding of scholarships to develop AI talents.

At the NVIDIA AI Conference in Singapore yesterday, NVIDIA and Singapore’s National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) agreed to establish a platform to bolster AI capabilities among its academic, research and industry stakeholders and in support of AI Singapore (AISG), a national programme set up in May to drive AI adoption, research and innovation in Singapore.

Called AI.Platform@NSCC, it will provide AI training, technical expertise and computing services to AISG, which brings together all Singapore-based research and tertiary institutions, including the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore University of Design and Technology (SUTD), Singapore Management University (SMU), as well as research institutions in the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

Tantalising line-up of speakers at NVIDIA AI Conference

More than 1,000 participants attending the NVIDIA AI Conference in Singapore next week are in for a treat as the organisers are bringing in a tantalising line-up of speakers.

The two keynote speakers are Dr David B Kirk, NVIDIA Fellow and inventor of more than 60 patents and patent applications relating to graphics design; and Dr Wanli Min, AI scientist of Alibaba Cloud, who will touch on A Revolutionary Road to Data Intelligence.

Besides these two, there are special guest-of-honour Chng Kai Fong, Managing Director of Singapore’s Economic Development Board, and a panel discussion on AI for the Future of Singapore Economy.

E-commerce to account for a quarter of retail sales by 2025

Greater internet and mobile device accessibility are driving e-commerce growth in Southeast Asia.

According to ABI Research, Smart Retail has gone through revolutionary changes in the past 10 years and will exponentially continue to do so going forward.  Brick and mortar stores are no longer the only option for consumers across the globe to make their everyday purchases, due to significant advancements in technology, both in-store and online.

Key players include Senion, who implements some of the world’s largest Indoor Positioning System (IPS) solutions to enhance in-store experiences, and AisleLabs who provides shopper traffic behavior analytics to help retailers optimise store layouts.  Leading POS software vendors, Shopkeep and Square are allowing retailers to sell across multi-channels from a single platform. These and other key vendors are paving paths to making the offline and online worlds seamless experiences.

Changing role of CIO

The role of the CIO is changing, according to a Gartner survey of 3,160 CIO respondents in 98 countries.

The findings revealed that the CIO role is transitioning from delivery executive to business executive, from controlling cost and engineering processes, to driving revenue and exploiting data.

Ninety-five percent of CIOs expect their jobs to change or be remixed due to digitalisation. While world-class IT delivery management is a given, it will take up less and less of the CIO’s time.

Enterprise wearables to hit 118m units in 2022

Royole flexible display.
Royole flexible display.

Enterprise wearable shipment will reach over 118 million in 2022, increasing from just over 38 million in 2017, a CAGR of 25 percent, according to ABI Research.

The enterprise wearables market is continuing to see stronger growth than the consumer market, which has shipment numbers increasing at a lower CAGR of 13 percent.

Healthcare devices, wearable cameras, and wearable scanners will account for 73 percent of enterprise wearable shipments in 2022. Innovative companies are leading the charge, such as Royole with flexible components, Waverly with real-time translation, and Axon (previously Taser) with wearable cameras.

China’s tech giants bet on NVIDIA Volta

China’s top technology companies are betting big on the NVIDIA Volta platform.

Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, and Tencent are incorporating NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerators into their data centres and cloud-service infrastructures to accelerate AI for a broad range of enterprise and consumer applications.

At the heart of the new Volta-based systems is the NVIDIA V100 data centre GPU. Built with 21 billion transistors, it provides a 5x improvement over the preceding NVIDIA Pascal architecture P100 GPU accelerators, while delivering the equivalent performance of 100 CPUs for deep learning. This performance surpasses by 4x the improvements that Moore’s law would have predicted over the same period of time.

Inspur, Lenovo and Huawei are using the NVIDIA HGX reference architecture to offer Volta-based accelerated systems for hyperscale data centres. Using HGX as a starter “recipe,” original equipment manufacturer and original design manufacturer partners can work with NVIDIA to more quickly design and bring to market a wide range of qualified GPU-accelerated AI systems for hyperscale data centres to meet the industry’s growing demand for AI cloud computing.

More NVIDIA GPU offerings on Google Cloud Platform

Google has expanded its NVIDIA GPU offerings on the Google Cloud Platform. These include:

  1. Performance boost with the public launch of NVIDIA P100 GPUs in beta
  2. NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs available on Google Compute Engine
  3. Introduction of sustained use discounts on both the Tesla K80 and P100 GPUs

According to a Google Cloud Platform blog, cloud GPUs can accelerate  workloads including machine learning training and inference, geophysical data processing, simulation, seismic analysis, molecular modeling, genomics and many more high performance compute use cases.

NVIDIA to hold first AI-focused conference in Singapore in October

With artificial intelligence (AI) being a hot topic this year, NVIDIA is organising its first AI-focused regional conference in Singapore on October 23 and 24.

The event will be held in two parts with the first day focusing on Deep Learning Institute (DLI) workshop where participants will received hands-on training on deep learningl and the second day filled with keynote addresses, panel discussion and three tracks. It is targeted at data scientists and senior decision makers in the field of AI in both public and private sectors.

“Singapore is aiming to be the world’s first smart nation and AI is playing a critical role. NVIDIA is well positioned to help drive the government’s Smart Nation initiative with the development of solutions based on AI. Our GPUs are making headlines across the world by enabling many breakthroughs in various industries using deep learning,” said Raymond Teh, Vice President of APAC sales and marketing at NVIDIA.

Australia PC market bucks global trend by inching up 3.3%

Consumer and enterprise PC purchases are driving growth in the Australia PC market, which includes desktop, notebook and workstation.

The consumer segment grew 8.6 percent year over year (YoY) in Q2, according to IDC.

“The retail channel was negatively impacted by Dick Smith’s exit last year. This year however, promotional events such as Modern PC program run by Harvey Norman spiked growth in the consumer space. AMD’s new Ryzen series launch and EOFY sales further fuelled growth in this segment,” said Sagar Raghavendra, Client Devices Analyst of IDC Australia.

NVIDIA and Indonesia university set up first AI R&D centre in Jakarta

Launch completed (from left): Raymond Teh of NVIDIA, Sanny Hadinata of Tech Data, Bernard Gunawan of BINUS Nusantara, Hengkie Kastono of HPE, Bens Pardamean of BINUS, and Bahtiar Saleh Abbas of BINUS.

NVIDIA has teamed up with BINUS University and Kinetica to establish the first artificial intelligence (AI) research and development (R&D) centre in Indonesia.

Located at the university’s Anggrek Campus, the centre will support BINUS University’s aim to be the premier R&D hub for Al in Indonesia. Leveraging the power of NVIDIA’s GPUs, it will be a showcase of the commercial potential of GPU-accelerated deep learning applications.

“Today, we stand at the beginning of the AI computing era, ignited by a new computing model, GPU deep learning. This new model — where deep neural networks are trained to recognise patterns from massive amounts of data — has proven to be ‘unreasonably’ effective at solving some of the most complex problems in computer science. In this era, software writes itself and machines learn. Soon, hundreds of billions of devices will be infused with intelligence. AI will revolutionise every industry. NVIDIA provides the products and solutions to power this revolution,” said Raymond Teh, Vice President of APAC Sales and Marketing of NVIDIA.

Security spending to hit US$86.4billion in 2017

With prominent ransomware attacks that affected many organisations, it is unsurprising that many are investing more in security products and services. According to Gartner, worldwide spending on information security products and services is expected to reach US$86.4 billion in 2017, an increase of 7 percent over 2016. This is expected to grow to US$93 billion in 2018.

Within the infrastructure protection segment, Gartner forecasts fast growth in the security testing market (albeit from a small base) due to continued data breaches and growing demands for application security testing as part of DevOps. Spending on emerging application security testing tools, particularly interactive application security testing, will contribute to the growth of this segment through 2021.

Security services will continue to be the fastest growing segment, especially IT outsourcing, consulting and implementation services. However, hardware support services will see growth slowing, due to the adoption of virtual appliances, public cloud and software as a service editions of security solutions, which reduces the need for attached hardware support overall.

NVIDIA invests in Chinese auto startup

NVIDIA is among a group of investors led by Chinese social media company Sina investing more than US$20 million in Chinese startup TuSimple.

Formed in 2015, TuSimple has more than 100 employees in R&D centres in Beijing and San Diego developing technology for autonomous long-distance freight delivery. It uses NVIDIA GPUs, NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2Jetson TX2CUDATensorRT, and cuDNN to develop its autonomous driving solution.

In June, the company successfully completed a 200-mile Level 4 test drive from San Diego to Yuma, Arizona, using NVIDIA GPUs and cameras as the primary sensor.

ICML: Gathering of the brightest in AI

“I’m amazed at the quality of the papers presented. The project teams’ line of thinking and breakthrough concepts are refreshing,” exclaimed a leading artificial intelligence (AI) scientist at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in Sydney.

International Convention Centre Sydney was a massive hive of activities as 3,000 of the world’s top researchers, developers and students in AI gathered for ICML. The participants moved rapidly from one workshop to another and took great interest in the exhibition booths of top deep learning proponents such as NVIDIA, Google and Facebook.

With so many bright young talents. the event proved to be a good fishing ground for vendors as they held recruitment interviews at their booths, as well as posted openings on the board.

Worldwide semiconductor market to grow 10.2% in 2017

Global semiconductor market is expected to grow 10.2 percent in 2017, to US$77.7 billion, according to Gartner.

This growth rate is up from the previous quarter’s forecast of 1.4 percent, due to continued aggressive investment in memory and leading-edge logic which is driving spending in wafer-level equipment.

“Spending momentum is more concentrated in 2017 mainly due to strong manufacturing demand in memory and leading-edge logic. The NAND flash shortage was more pronounced in the first quarter of 2017 than the previous forecast, leading to over 20 percent growth of etch and chemical vapor deposition (CVD) segments in 2017 with a strong capacity ramp-up for 3D NAND,” said Takashi Ogawa, Research Vice President of Gartner.

AI to fuel next wave of cloud growth

The cloud infrastructure services market is continuing to grow strongly, up 47 percent year on year in Q2 to reach US$14 billion, according to Canalys. Growth was driven by demand for primary cloud infrastructure services, such as on-demand computing and storage, across all customer segments and industries.

However, future growth is expected to be fueled by customers using the artificial intelligence (AI) platforms cloud service providers are building to develop new applications, processes, services, and user experiences.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) maintained its leadership position, growing 42 percent on an annual basis and accounting for more than 30 percent of total spend. But its growth rate was lower than those of its main rivals, Microsoft (up 97 percent growth) and Google (up 92 percent), but higher than fourth-placed IBM (up 23 percent). Overall, the top four cloud services providers represented 55 percent of the cloud infrastructure services market, which includes IaaS and PaaS.

Motorola and Neurala to work on intelligent cameras

Motorola Solutions and Neurala will develop intelligent cameras that will enable police officers to more efficiently search for objects or persons of interest, such as missing children and suspects.

The companies will integrate Neurala’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities with Motorola Solutions’ software and cameras, including its Si500 body-worn camera. The integration will create intelligent cameras that can learn “at the edge” and automatically search for persons or objects of interest – significantly reducing the time and effort required to find a missing child or suspicious object in environments that are often crowded or chaotic.

“We see powerful potential for AI to improve safety and efficiency for our customers, which in turn helps create safer communities. But applying AI in a public safety setting presents unique challenges. Neurala’s ‘edge learning’ capabilities will help us explore solutions for a variety of public safety workflows such as finding a missing child or investigating an object of interest, such as a bicycle,” said Paul Steinberg, Chief Technology Officer of Motorola Solutions.

NVIDIA Tesla V100 surprise for world’s top AI researchers

Fifteen top AI research institutions of the NVIDIA AI Labs programmes were each presented with the Volta-based NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerator.

They were participating in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in Honolulu.

“AI is the most powerful technology force that we have ever known. I’ve seen everything. I’ve seen the coming and going of the client-server revolution. I’ve seen the coming and going of the PC revolution. Absolutely nothing compares,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA.

AI takes centrestage at ICML in Sydney

NVIDIA is bringing its wealth of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions and expertise to the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in Sydney.

Held at Sydney International Convention Centre from August 6 to 11, the event is expected to attract up to 3,000 participants, primarily faculty, researchers and PhD students in machine learning, data science, data mining, AI, statistics, and related fields.

The NVIDIA booth (Level 2, The Gallery, Booth #4) will feature many firsts in Australia, such as demos on 4K style transfer, a deep neural network to extract a specific artistic style from a source painting, and then synthesises this information with the content of a separate video; self-driving auto using the Drive PX2 AI car computing platform; Deepstream SDK that simplifies development of high performance video analytics applications powered by deep learning; and NVIDIA Isaac, the AI-based software platform lets developers train virtual robots using detailed and highly realistic test scenarios.

Dell launches 14th gen servers

Dell has announced worldwide availability of the next generation of the Dell PowerEdge server portfolio which forms a scalable, automated and secure compute platform for traditional and cloud-native applications.

With its scalable business architecture, intelligent automation and integrated security, the new Dell PowerEdge 14th generation server portfolio delivers aims to be the bedrock of the modern data centre, enabling customers to push innovation further and faster to achieve their IT transformation goals.

The scalable business architecture of Dell PowerEdge servers helps customers efficiently meet their changing business needs with enhanced performance capabilities for traditional, virtualised and cloud-native workloads in a software-defined data centre.

Students’ demand drives Aussie IT spending

Australian educational institutions are increasing information technology (IT) spending in response to dramatic changes in student expectations, according to IDC.

Spending by Australian educational institutions is expected to peak at US$1.6 billion by 2020, driven by software and services related investments. Education practices are shifting away from the classroom towards e-learning and virtual instructor-led training approaches as students are demanding anytime-anywhere remote access.

In its recently published Australian education sector report, IDC highlights the need to overhaul existing ICT management models in schools and universities so that a step-change improvement in delivery efficiency can be achieved.

APAC PC market down 5.1% in Q2

PC shipment in the Asia-Pacific region surpassed 21,5 million units, down 5.1 percent in Q2 compared to the same period last year, according to Gartner.

The dip was due to primarily due to market dynamics in India and China. In India, the pent up demand after the demonetisation cooled down after Q1, coupled with the absence of a large tender deal compared to a year ago and higher PC prices, brought about weak market growth. China was hugely impacted by the rise in PC prices due to the component shortage.

Overall, global PC shipment totaled 61.1 million units in Q2, a 4.3 percent decline from the same quarter last year.

NVIDIA invests in Deep Instinct

NVIDIA is investing in Deep Instinct, an Israeli-based startup that uses deep learning to thwart cyber attacks.

Deep Instinct uses a GPU-based neural network and CUDA to achieve 99 percent detection rates, compared with about 80 percent detection from conventional cyber security software. Its software can automatically detect and defeat the most advanced cyber attacks.

“Deep Instinct is an emerging leader in applying GPU-powered AI through deep learning to address cybersecurity, a field ripe for disruption as enterprise customers migrate away from traditional solutions. We’re excited to work together with Deep Instinct to advance this important field,” said Jeff Herbst, Vice President of Business Development of NVIDIA.

Fujitsu announces new Xeon-based servers

Fujitsu has introduced its fully refreshed range of Xeon-based dual- and quad-socket Primergy servers and octo-socket Primequest business critical server systems.

These new servers are powerful and flexible, enabling enterprises to build secure, agile, multi-cloud data centres.

Featuring the new Intel Xeon scalable processors, the Fujitsu Server Primergy and Primequest business model server systems are designed for exceptional workload-specific performance and hardware-enhanced security. Built for trusted data service delivery, the new models represent significant leaps in I/O, memory, storage and network technologies.

Singapore seeks feedback on cybersecurity bill

Singapore’s Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI) and the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) are seeking feedback on the proposed Cybersecurity Bill.

The public consultation exercise will run till August 3.

“Cyber-attacks are getting increasingly frequent, sophisticated and impactful. Globally, we have also seen a surge in the number of cybersecurity incidents, such as ransomware, cyber theft, banking fraud, cyber espionage and disruptions to Internet services. In Singapore, the recent Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks targeting two of our universities, and the occurrence of the global WannaCry and Petya/Petna malware attacks which also reached our shores, serve as stark reminders of Singapore’s vulnerability to cyber threats,” noted the joint press release.

NVIDIA and Baidu team up on AI

NVIDIA and Baidu have teamed up to bring artificial intelligence (AI) technology to cloud computing, self-driving vehicles and AI home assistants.

Baidu will deploy NVIDIA HGX architecture with Tesla Volta V100 and Tesla P4 GPU accelerators for AI training and inference in its data centres. Combined with Baidu’s PaddlePaddle deep learning framework and NVIDIA’s TensorRT deep learning inference software, researchers and companies can harness state-of-the-art technology to develop products and services with real-time understanding of images, speech, text and video.

To accelerate AI development, the companies will work together to optimise Baidu’s open-source PaddlePaddle deep learning framework on NVIDIA’s Volta GPU architecture.

Petya ransomware cripples networks

Just like a scene out of a Hollywood movie, one computer after computer shut down without notice during a meeting. That’s what happened at one of the organisations hit by the Petya ransomware attack.

The strike is malicious and deadly with many affected organisations struggling to recover lost data — some, if not all, of which may never be restored.

IT security teams are still working to get their networks and computers up and running. Some have turned to Apple computers, which are relatively unscathed, to work on the recovery process.

Bizagi and Fuji Xerox HK in strategic partnership

Digital process automation software provider Bizagi and Fuji Xerox (Hong Kong) have formed a strategic partnership to help organisations in Hong Kong thrive in the digital era.

Bizagi’s Digital Business Platform connects people, applications, devices and information to deliver the foundations of a digital business. It is known for its ease-of-use, short time to deliver value, scalability, and wide integration capabilities.

“We are pleased to form our first strategic partnership in the region. By combining the deep expertise from Fuji Xerox (Hong Kong) in business process services with the wide ranging capabilities of our leading digital business platform, we can offer the region’s most comprehensive solutions and services for digital transformation,” said Gustavo Gomez, CEO of Bizagi.

NVIDIA receives DOE funding for HPC research

NVIDIA is among six technology companies to receive a total of US$258 funding from the US Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP).

The funding is to accelerate the development of next-generation supercomputers with the delivery of at least two exascale computing systems, one of which is targeted by 2021.

Such systems would be about 50 times  more powerful than the US’ fastest supercomputer, Titan, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

OpenSynergy’s virtualisation platform now supports ARMv8-A architecture

OpenSynergy’s COQOS SDK v9.0 virtualisation platform now supports ARMv8-A architectures.

The 64-bit bus width of the ARMv8-A processors makes it possible to meet the high performance requirements of the next generation automotive ECU’s such as cockpit controllers or driver assistance systems.

“With COQOS SDK v9.0, we enable our customers to take full advantage of the newest automotive system-on-chips (SoCs),” said Stefaan Sonck Thiebaut, CEO of OpenSynergy.

Security concern for wearable cameras in enterprises

As the enterprise wearable camera market continues to grow through law enforcement, field services and first responder applications due to their ability to collect evidence and record interactions, so do privacy and data protection concerns, according to ABI Research.

The research firm forecasts enterprise wearable camera shipment to reach nearly 24 million in 2022.

“Despite clear advantages to the usage of this technology, enterprises fear attacks from cybercriminals and data theft. With massive data leaks often reaching mainstream news, public concern is rising over the security of wearable camera recordings, including who has access to such footage and for how long,” said Stephanie Lawrence, Research Analyst of ABI Research.

Singapore and Shanghai among top autonomous vehicle cities

Shanghai and Singapore are among the world’s top four cities that are ready for autonomous vehicles, according to Canalys.

San Francisco is out in front while London is also among the top four. These rise to the top of a group of cities that, due to their size and populations, have some of the most complex transport networks in the world. The top four have a high need for autonomous vehicles to revolutionise their transport systems, combined with the ability to make it happen.

“Naturally, San Francisco leads the way and is the city best able to implement autonomous vehicles. The Bay Area is renowned as the world’s AV testing capital,” said Chris Jones, Chief Analyst of Canalys.

Taiwan: Home of GeForce!

At the keynote of NVIDIA AI Forum, NVIDIA CEO and Founder Jensen Huang called “Taiwan is the home of NVIDIA’s GeForce system”.

Video gaming is a US$100 billion industry and “GeForce PC gaming is the number one platform, nearly 200 million GeForce installed base,” declared Huang.

He announced the new NVIDIA Max-Q platform which lets gaming notebook makers produce faster, slimmer and quieter machines.

Singapore to focus on 4 technology areas

Singapore will be focusing on four technology areas to build the foundation for its digital transformation. These are artificial intelligence (AI) and data science, cybersecurity, immersive media, and Internet of Things and future communications infrastructure.

At the opening of Infocomm Media Business Exchange at Marina Bay Sands Singapore Convention Centre, Minister for Communications and Information Dr Yaacob Ibrahim noted that “they are exciting fields with bright prospects in their own right, and they have great potential to transform other industries and enhance people’s lives”.

Artificial Intelligence and Data Science
The nation has established AI.SG, a national programme with funding of up to S$150 million to boost Singapore’s AI capabilities.

Enhancing public safety

Motorola Solutions has unveiled highly advanced technology solutions to enhance the capabilities of nation-wide public safety networks at Critical Communications World 2017 in Hong Kong. These include mission-critical radio technologies, specialised software, mission critical broadband, command […]

From professional skills to utilities

Robots driven by artificial intelligence (AI) are replacing workers in various labour-intensive and service sectors but doctors, lawyers and even IT professionals are at risk of being made redundant. Or at least, certain aspects of each of these practices.

According to Gartner, smart machines and robots may replace highly trained professionals in tasks within medicine, law and IT by 2022 — that’s just five years more!

“The economics of AI and machine learning will lead to many tasks performed by professionals today becoming low-cost utilities. AI’s effects on different industries will force the enterprise to adjust its business strategy. Many competitive, high-margin industries will become more like utilities as AI turns complex work into a metered service that the enterprise pays for, like electricity,” said Stephen Prentice, Vice President and Gartner Fellow.

Battle for the cloud

The battle for cloud dominance has intensified with key players all growing significantly in Q1. The worldwide cloud infrastructure services market grew 42 percent year on year to reach US$11.4 billion, according to Canalys.

Amazon’s AWS maintained its leadership, holding a stable global market share of 31 percent. It was followed by Microsoft, Google and IBM.

In terms of growth, Microsoft led with 93 percent while Google was up 74 percent, AWS 43 percent, and IBM 38 percent.

Toyota cruises with NVIDIA Drive PX2

Prime mover powered by NVIDIA Drive PX2.

Toyota, one of the world’s largest automakers and renowned for its high standards and priority on safety, has picked NVIDIA Drive PX for its autonomous vehicles. It will use the AI car computer platform to power advanced autonomous driving systems planned for market introduction within the next few years

Engineering teams from the two companies are already developing sophisticated software that will enhance the capabilities of Toyota vehicles, enabling them to better understand the massive volume of data generated by sensors on the car, and to handle the broad spectrum of autonomous driving situations.

“Toyota has worked on autonomous driving technologies for over 20 years with the aim of reducing traffic fatalities to zero as an ultimate goal, achieving smoother traffic, and providing mobility for all. Through this collaboration, we intend to accelerate the development of autonomous driving systems that are even more safe and capable,” said Ken Koibuchi, Executive General Manager of Toyota.

Finally, the Big Bang for AI!

I am AI opening video at GTC 2017 keynote.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not new. In fact, it has so many false starts over the past 60 years. The term went into hibernation for a long time.

Research into AI began way back in Dartmouth College in 1956 and was constantly associated with being the next frontier in the 1980s when mainframe computers ruled and supercomputers were a ginormous investment that very few could afford.

Despite the research put in over the years, the technology never quite took off and fell flat in many instances.

Voila, Volta!

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announcing Tesla V100.

NVIDIA has pulled yet another trick out of its always-filled hat of technology goodies with the launch of Volta, the world’s most powerful GPU computing architecture. At his keynote address at GTC in San Jose, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang dubbed it “the next level of computer projects”.

Volta is created to drive the next wave of advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) and high performance computing.

The first Volta-based processor is the NVIDIA Tesla V100 data centre GPU, which brings extraordinary speed and scalability for AI inferencing and training, as well as for accelerating HPC and graphics workloads.

NVIDIA to train 100,000 deep learning developers this year

Greg Estes of NVIDIA (left) addressing the global media at a press conference at GTC.

Interest in deep learning is growing so strongly that NVIDIA expects to train 100,000 developers this year — that’s 10 times more than last year —through its Deep Learning Institute (DLI).

According to research firm IDC, 80 percent of all applications will have an artificial intelligence (AI) component by 2020.

Greg Estes, Vice President of Developer Programs at NVIDIA, noted that there is a hunger for deep learning training. He cited the example of a DLI training at India Institute of Technology (IIT) in India where people came at 7.30am to try to sign up for a fully subscribed course.