Today's brightest AI innovators share knowledge and insights at Intel AI DevJam and Student Ambassador Forum
AI developers, data scientists and students assembled for an evening of networking and training in AI solutions powered by Intel® technologies at the latest Intel® Nervana™ AI DevJam and Student Ambassador Forum. Both events were held September 18 at The Village in San Francisco in conjunction with the O’Reilly AI Conference.
Hosted by Intel® Nervana™ AI Academy, this event helped AI developers and students increase their knowledge and learn how to put machine learning to use quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively on Intel® architecture.
Some 500 AI-focused attendees took part in the events, sharpening their machine learning skills as they engaged with AI experts from Intel as well as external experts who are part of Intel’s Innovator and Student Ambassador programs.
Demos Feature What’s New in AI
The DevJam and the Student Ambassador Forum showcased technical AI demos from Intel as well as from Intel® Software Innovators and Intel® Student Ambassadors. Activities were dedicated to highlighting notable new developments and star innovators in AI, as well as tools, frameworks, resources, and training available from Intel.
Demos at the Intel Nervana AI DevJam event included:
- Intel® Nervana™ AI Academy– Showcasing the AI Academy, this demo illustrates its offering including training through online tutorials, webinars, student kits; development opportunities through exclusive access to the Intel® Nervana™ DevCloud; teaching materials through coursework and exercises; and collaboration opportunities through Intel® Developer Mesh and events.
- BigDL: Deep Learning on Apache Spark*– This distributed deep learning framework provides rich deep learning support for better scale, higher resource utilization, and improved TCO, among other benefits.
Vehicle Rear Vision with Movidius*– Intel® Software Innovator Peter Ma demonstrated an add-on camera for vehicles that combines radar and AI technology including the Movidius Neural Compute Stick to achieve safer backup driving.
- Deep Learning for Power Line Fault Detection– This showcased how Intel® architecture and Intel-optimized Tensorflow* are used for object recognition, enabling drones to capture footage of power lines and recognize faults. Power lines, pylons, and other objects are identified and classified using Tensorflow.
- Multi-Stick on Raspberry Pi - Developers may wonder whether it is possible to plug multiple Neural Compute Sticks (NCSs) into a hub and run them all simultaneously to further speed-up a neural network that’s processing successive frames of video. The answer is ‘yes’! This demo showcased four NCSs in a hub, operating a neural network recognizing objects as the four sticks are successively processing images to recognize the objects in those images. It demonstrates the scalability when prototyping neural networks using NCS.
- Visual Knowledge Graph – This demo provided attendees with a fun and positive view of the work Vilynx is doing with the Visual Knowledge Graph and how it will be available for the machine and deep learning community as a training set.
- AI for Good – Many developers and companies are exploring opportunities to develop AI applications for good. This demo showcased how Intel is working with Thorn to try and prevent child human trafficking through image searching optimization. See an example of facial recognition technology at work.
- Tensorflow* Optimizations on Intel® Architecture - TensorFlow is an open-source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. Intel and Google engineers are working together to optimize TensorFlow as a flexible AI framework for Intel® Xeon® and Intel® Xeon Phi™ processors.
Keynote and Panels Provide Insight on AI Industry
A highlight of the DevJam event was the keynote Q&A delivered by Naveen Rao, Intel Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Artificial Intelligence Products Group.
Preceding Rao's keynote was a student panel moderated by Scott Apeland, Director of the Intel® Developer Programs. During this segment, student participants discussed AI curriculum and what their instructors believe is shaping the future of AI. Panelists included Panuwat Janwattanapong, Florida International University; Nikhil Murthy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Andy Rosales Elias, UC Santa Barbara; Pallab Paul, Rutgers University; and Srivignessh Pacham Sri Srinivasan, Arizona State University.
Apeland also moderated a fireside chat and brief Q&A session with Intel experts discussing “The Future of Intel and AI.” Panelists included Julie Choi, Director of AI Products Group Marketing; and Hanlin Tang, Staff Algorithms Engineer.
Student Ambassadors Showcase Their Work
During the Student Ambassador Forum, student presenters discussed their research and projects and shared their experiences in the AI space. Student ambassadors also had the opportunity to demonstrate their projects at DevJam:
Face It - AI Hairstyle Recommender– Intel Student Ambassador Pallab Paul showed how AI technology can scan a customer’s face to determine overall features and shape. Customers can select a style appropriate to their hair and lifestyle. The technology then offers various hairstyle recommendations and hair-related tips.
Deep Auto-Encoders for Network Intrusion Detection– To detect anomalous behavior without outside supervision, Intel Student Ambassador Srivignessh Pacham Sri Srinivasan demonstrated how a network learns the stable state of its environment online using deep auto-encoders.
Classify Images in Apache Spark*– This demo showcased the use of deep learning in Spark* to provide a framework to classify images of food as vegetarian or non-vegetarian.
By participating in Intel® Nervana™ AI Academy, developers, data scientists, students, professors and startups can access the latest tools, optimized frameworks, training for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning. If you are new to AI, the Academy offers ideas and guidance on where to begin.
For more AI-related news from O’Reilly Conference, checkout Data Center Group Vice President and General Manager Lisa Spellman’s announcement on Intel® Nervana™ DevCloud a cloud-hosted hardware and software platform for developers, data scientists, researchers, academics and startups to learn, sandbox and accelerate development of AI solutions with free compute cloud access powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors:
Intel Accelerates Accessibility to AI with Developer Cloud Computing Resources
Follow other Intel® Nervana™ AI Academy happenings at @IntelSoftware