Posted by Bangalore: Intel India hosted the AI (Artificial Intelligence) DevCon, aimed at bringing together the top minds in data science, machine and deep learning, application development, and research to support the creation of AI-ready talent in the country. The inaugural event took place in the US earlier this year, and is now taking place in a few of Intel’s key markets.
Attended by more than 500 developers, the event served as a platform to share updates on real-world applications of AI that can benefit businesses, and people. Intel is committed to accelerating the accessibility of AI tools across industries, and drive the next wave of computing by strategically investing in developer education.
Last year, the company has hosted AI Day in Bangalore, and showcased how it’s working with the e-commerce, BFSI, cloud service provider, academia, and developer community, to enable use of deep learning, machine learning, and natural language processing solutions based Intel architecture to promote the growth and widespread adoption of AI.
“In April 2017, we committed to train 15,000 developers, students, and professors in AI. We have long surpassed our goal; today, over 99,000 people across more than 100 organizations have been engaged with, through relevant trainings and workshops. We have been able to accomplish this through our strong collaboration with the academia, government, and the private sector. This streak will continue as we engage with local platforms such as Analytics Vidhya, to train data scientists and developers,” said Prakash Mallya, MD – Sales & Marketing Group, Intel India.
Intel India is also collaborating with companies such as Philips, arya.ai, and Mphasis NEXT Labs to deploy its AI portfolio in the local ecosystem. Speakers from Reliance Jio, Flipkart, Airtel, Amazon, Wipro, Microsoft, pi Ventures, and IIIT Hyderabad were at the DevCon, and addressed various facets of AI, ranging from the evolution of AI thinking and its capability to create new revenue streams, to the ethical component of the technology and its impact on the larger world population.
“The Intel AI Developer Conference in India is a testament to our local collaborations for developing AI technology, and growing the ecosystem” added Gadi Singer, VP and Architecture GM, Artificial Intelligence – Intel Corporation. “Today, a diverse set of Indian companies have shown how they are effectively using AI to accelerate their business, and shape the end user experience. Their insights and solutions reflect the great potential that India has for AI technology development.”
The event in Bangalore included technical sessions and hands-on training on popular AI frameworks, real-world demos, and talk tracks on cutting-edge research in the space. One day prior to the event, the company also hosted an AI developer workshop with handpicked 150 developers, to provide hands on experience using the Intel Dev Cloud, and optimized frameworks on Intel architecture.
Intel will continue to engage AI developers and startups in India through the Intel AI Academy and the Intel AI Builders Program.
“At Philips, we truly believe that AI can be a game changer for healthcare and we call it Adaptive Intelligence. It combines AI and other methods with knowledge of the clinical, operational, or personal context in which they are used. AI can address paucity of healthcare infrastructure, enabling doctors and hospitals to be more productive and help better patient outcomes. This in turn would bring down cost of care, lead to more patients getting treated and improved quality of care. Another area which finds application of AI is in the critical care space. The opportunities are endless and AI if applied with a local context, can enable intelligent healthcare anytime, anywhere”, said Ravi Ramaswamy, Senior Director, Health Systems -Philips Innovation Campus.
“As a platform and tool for deep learning, the Intel AI Builders Program has helped us to access and experiment on new architectures, further optimizing the deep learning solutions built on Arya.ai. We achieved performance boost of 5.9x in inferencing workloads using Intel optimized Tensorflow and Intel distributed Python. We continue to work with Intel in delivering such industry best performance to our customers”, said Vinay Kumar, CEO & Founder of Arya.ai.
“The Intel AI Builders Program is a tremendous opportunity for us to use the vast array of hardware and software accelerators, as well as training material, to optimize various aspects of the AI model development and testing life cycle. We have built several AI solutions based on Intel’s tools, and have seen exponential improvement in our development cycles,” said Dr. Jai Ganesh, SVP and Head, Mphasis NEXT Labs. The company has been an early collaborator in the Intel AI Builders Program, which was announced in May this year.