Tag: AI
Banksy Meets HPC & AI in Bristol
As a late sign-up for the recent HPC & AI Meetup in Bristol, I was feeling relaxed coming in without a speaking slot and only the objective of meeting some colleagues and hearing a few lightning talks... Well, all that changed with two minutes from the start when our MC for the night, Verne Global's fabulous Simone Warren, told me that I had just been awarded the honour of giving the closing remarks... Her rationale was sound - it was a technical meeting - perhaps the CTO should give the exit speech
Water Trends – Rumours from the Trade Show Floor
Perhaps it is because I returned from my last business trip of 2019 to a flooded house, but more likely it's all the wicked cool water-cooled equipment that I encountered at SC-19 that I'm in a watery mood!... Many of the hardware vendors at SC19 were pushing their exascale-ready devices and about 15% of the devices on a typical computer manufacturer's booth were water-cooled... Adding rack-level water cooling is theoretically straight forward, so I spent a few minutes checking out the various options.
Think Before We All Jump: The Most Important AI Considerations for Humans
As I've recently discussed in my latest blog post, artificial intelligence operates most efficiently when it is commoditising intelligence and decision making... Simple and repetitive tasks, and later complex and repetitive tasks, will be 'solved' through artificial intelligence... While we are starting to see real proof of the scientific and business benefits that come from this streamlining and processing of data, there are moral and ethical discussions beginning to take place
Why AI Could Be Our Best Conservation Tool Yet
Since the 2nd December the 25th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP25) has been taking place in Madrid and next week sees the 10th anniversary of the excellent Sustainable Innovation Forum, organised by Climate Action... The forum is the largest business event alongside the conference and underpins the important role business and technology has in helping accelerate efforts to mitigate climate change... At the forum this year AI will be a major talking point - both in terms of its potential to protect ecosystems, and unfortunately - to damage, unless AI is powered by genuinely green energy.
Think Before You Jump: The Most Important AI Considerations for Businesses
Last month I moderated an AI disruptor panel at the World Summit AI in Amsterdam... Our conversation covered the moral, economic and practical considerations that need to be taken into account when it comes to the future disruptions AI will bring... As MIT President, L
The AI Circuit – Rumours from the Trade Show Floor
I'm starting to feel like a Formula 1 racing driver where every month is a new venue with huge crowds but in my case it's AI industry events... This autumn I'm alternating events across the Atlantic providing a great insight into any differences in current practices between North America and Europe.... Back in October I attended the excellent World AI Summit in Amsterdam
Qubits North America - Rumours from the Trade Show Floor
It's lunchtime here in the beautiful city of Amsterdam where I am enjoying my time at the excellent World Summit AI, at which Verne Global are exhibiting, and earlier today our CTO Tate Cantrell moderated an engaging panel on today's hottest AI disruptors... As I take a breather from the networking, I thought I would write some reflections about another excellent event which I went to a couple of weeks ago - Qubits North America.... Run by D-Wave, Qubits was a fabulous event, held in a superb venue in Newport, RI without the summer crowds but with the summer weather
HPC & AI workloads lead to Rome
Last week I travelled to the Italian capital, Rome, for an event which I believe will prove very significant for the international high performance computing (HPC) industry... After many years away from the HPC arena and the overall server market, AMD is back with a bang and a new range of powerful processors through its AMD EPYC series... The company started its comeback with the AMD EPYC 7601 range - codenamed "Naples" in 2017 and on Wednesday I witnessed the European launch of their next edition - the AMD EPYC 7002 processors which, as you've now probably realised, are codenamed "Rome"
HPC & AI on Wall Street - Rumours from the Trade Show Floor
New York is always an exciting, energetic city to visit and last week was made even more so as I attended the 'HPC & AI on Wall Street' conference which HPCWire are now championing... It was well worth the train ride from Boston and interesting to see the varied mix of attendees present and hear how HPC and AI is evolving in the world of finance.... All sectors of the financial services industry (FSI) were represented at the conference from traditional, old school banks to venture capital firms, fintechs and hedge funds
AI in Sports - When the Video Assistant Referee Can Save the Game
As a fan of the England national football team, I have gotten used to regular disappointment... Most recently there was the heartbreak of the 2018 FIFA World Cup semi-final loss to Croatia, and prior to that the embarrassment of not even making it out of the group stages in 2014... However, going back further there is one moment that stands head and shoulders above the rest for me, THAT Frank Lampard goal in the 2010 FIFA World Cup quarter-final between England and Germany.
What's Lang Lang Got That AI Hasn't?
In my first blog discussing the role of AI in the music industry, which you can check out here, I explored how software is transforming the way music is produced behind the scenes... It led me to further explore how AI technology is learning to perform music itself, and to share my own opinions, speaking as a musician, on the exceeding potential but also definitive limitations of AI...
Could Your Next Favourite Artist Be A Robot?
We've discovered that AI can perform methodically and analytically, but does it have the potential to mimic the human mind's creativity in order to produce a unique work of art such as a musical score? The devising process for music takes imagination; it is a challenge for even the most right-brained people to compose something brilliant that a listener has never heard before... It is even more of a challenge for that music to hold feeling and soul - so how could a computer possibly manage such a task when it ultimately has neither?...
Trust is not a Four-letter Word
A couple of weeks ago Frankfurt may have hosted the purveyors of the fastest machines on the planet at the International Supercomputing Conference ISC19, but it also was the location of a really fascinating meetup focused on innovation in the field of Artificial Intelligence.... Verne Global joined up with hosts WeWork to help sponsor the June Artificial Intelligence Meetup Frankfurt... As I joked with the standing-room only crowd of over 170 participants, there are just so many options when thinking about a topic for a 20-minute talk on Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is taking centre stage in today’s film making
When watching a film, you may be the sort of person who immerses themselves in the story and special effects with a view to a couple of hours of escapism... Or, perhaps like me, you are the type who wants to work out what is real and what is computer generated imagery (CGI) and how realistic it really is... Either way, filmmakers continue to push the boundaries to improve the quality and variety of the special effects they deliver with the purpose of enhancing the audience experience and keep us coming back to the box-office
Wolf in Open Source clothing
In an interesting Medium Article, Andrew Leonard wrote about how Amazon may be starting to compete with some of its Open Source software partners... Andrew's article delved into the specifics of the case involving Elastic and their Elasticsearch open source software... Elastic has been happy to offer Elasticsearch in its Open Source form on the AWS platform, and many customers were happy to consume Elastic's capabilities that way.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Bank of England
On Monday of this week, the Bank of England governor Mark Carney promised to reinvent the Bank of England to make it fit for the "new economy" of the "Fourth Industrial Revolution", reflecting changes in how society, business and government operate.... The governor indicated that the bank was beginning to opening up its own payments infrastructure to start-ups from the FinTech sector, while also delivering increasing emphasis on concerns such as climate change... At the same time, the bank would also be looking to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) to assist the bank in facing changes in technology and the world economy.
How AI can keep your executives out of jail
Only artificial intelligence (AI) can prevent social media firms from shutting their doors... Costs, fines and executive jail terms are threatened as the government tackles online harm.... Stricter regulation of social media companies is now high up on the agenda of many national governments
AI and HPC Field Trip - Rumours from the trade show floor
... The long-lasting Icelandic winter didn't impact the momentum of our second AI and HPC Field Trip... Once again we gathered around 15 practitioners from the worlds of AI, machine learning, deep learning and high performance computing to network and brainstorm together, as well as tour our industrial scale campus on Iceland's former NATO based near Keflavik.
2019 GTC San Jose – Rumours from the trade show floor
NVIDIA's GPU Technical Conference (GTC) in San Jose always marks the start of spring... Although at this time of year the daffodils haven't yet broken ground in Boston, but the days are warming, and the snow is becoming less frequent... In San Jose spring was in full swing with sunny days and temperatures above 20⁰C following a winter of record rains
AI & HPC in France
As a French citizen living in London with the dark Brexit cloud looming over us all, I am pleased to see some things moving in the right direction in my beloved home country such as the massive investments the Macron government has made to push for tech innovations throughout the country and the upgrades it so desperately needed... ...
Classic HPC v New HPC – Rumours from the trade show floor
Sometimes the combination of networking at a trade show and catching an insightful presentation provide a valuable insight into market dynamics... Earlier this year I attended the HPC and Quantum Computing summit in London and following this, watched Addison Snell's (CEO of Intersect360 Research) "The New HPC" presentation from the last Stamford HPC Conference... Both confirmed my HPC suspicions garnered over the last year
NeurIPS – Rumours from the trade show floor
Generally, trade shows follow the sun and tourists to popular vacation destinations... Everyone loves a conference in San Diego or Orlando! The recently rebranded NeurIPS (formally NIPS) took a different road this year and visited Montreal in early December... Montreal is one of my favourite cities but in early December it's the season for cold, cloudy weather and infrequent freezing rain
Integration of AI systems at scale
Today, data scientists and machine learning engineers can implement systems for tackling discrete tasks with a very high degree of success... Results in fields such as image processing to support cancer diagnosis can be extremely accurate, with the best performing algorithms even exceeding experienced clinicians for certain categories of cancer diagnosis....
Explainable AI
SC18 here in Dallas is proving once again to be a fascinating melting pot of HPC insights and observations, and it's intriguing to see the continuing convergence of AI into the supercomputing ecosystem... Along these lines I started to think about the movement towards 'Explainable AI'... Being able to explain and understand how models work when making predictions about the real world is a fundamental tenet of science
What to look out for at SC18
SC: The big show with an international HPC audience celebrates its 30th year in 2018... It's the World Cup of supercomputing and now it's more than "just" supercomputing... Advancements in data analytics have topics like artificial intelligence (AI), including machine learning and deep learning, as stars of the show.
AI Icelandic Style – Deep Learning in Reykjavik
Last week I was privileged to be part of our AI and HPC Field Trip to Iceland... The goal of the trip was to share insight and observations around the evolution of AI deep neural network (DNN) training and to tour our HPC-optimised data center... The attendees spanned DNN veterans like Eric Sigler of OpenAI, large enterprise data science leaders like Pardeep Bassi of Liverpool Victoria Insurance (LVE) and start-up pioneers like Max Gerer of e-bot7
Deep Learning at Scale
Deep learning is a current hot topic in HPC and I am sure it will be one of the key themes at SC18... In many cases, we have been hearing about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning discussed together, though in reality, machine learning is a type of AI, and deep learning is a subset of machine learning... In this article, we will try to best define deep learning and its industrial applications and, more specifically, the benefits of scale - from big data to high-performance computing - to the successful implementation of deep learning.
AI needs to be ‘explainable’ but is that possible?
Amazon's AI made the news early in October after it was revealed that the company had scrapped a recruitment engine because it was 'sexist'... Private Eye, the UK's satirical news magazine, described it as "a reminder to take an extra big pinch of salt whenever you hear that AI will improve the world"... However, the reality is more complicated...
GTC Munich – Rumours from the trade show floor
It was a treat to be in Germany for the last two weeks attending NVIDIA's GTC Europe in Munich and prior to this the HPC User Forum in Stuttgart... The Autumn weather was mostly warm and sunny - great for the Octoberfest but certainly not "free air cooling" for computer clusters despite most of Europe's AI, HPC and Virtual Reality boffins being in town! Once again, here are some observations and insights from my travels......
Trends Advancing Industrial HPC
The global research community, be it academic or applied, has a rich heritage of driving innovation and breakthroughs enabled by HPC... From a business perspective, what are the industry trends around supercomputing and HPC in advancing innovation in key markets?... Three particularly hot topics
AI and HPC Field Trip to Iceland (23-25 October 2018)
Verne Global is excited to announce we will be running an AI and HPC Field Trip to Iceland between the 23-25 October... The Field Trip will bring a select group of European and North American AI pioneers together to share insight, network and showcase how AI communities in Iceland are pushing the boundaries of AI and deep neural network development....
AI is a great opportunity, but banks must innovate faster
The impact of AI on the lives of consumers and the operation of businesses is slowly growing... Whether it's the increasing visibility of autonomous vehicles or the small conveniences of a voice assistant such as Amazon's Alexa, we're beginning to get a sense of what AI can do... However, we're still at the beginning
Talking Ai with London Cab Drivers
Being a daytime Londoner one of my favourite pastimes is to take an occasional ride in a proper London black cab and have a natter along the way... This is often a pretty cathartic experience - probably more so for the driver than the passenger, but I find it entertaining being the listening post, and London cab drivers are a good measure of the mood of the city....
3D Map Making Challenges for Autonomous Driving
Building accurate road maps is a central part of the effort to build and deploy more autonomous vehicles in the real world... The term "map" may be a bit of a misnomer, though, because these maps aren't anything like the flat 2D images available online, they're complete three-dimensional recreations of roadside environments that are updated on a continuous basis to provide a high degree of accuracy — often down to the centimeter scale... These 3D digital maps are a critical part of an autonomous vehicle's ability to perceive the world, and have key applications in other technologies, which has made the effort to develop the definitive map a highly competitive endeavour.
Faster mobile speeds will bring big changes…but it will take time
The noise around 5G is growing... The new mobile data standard is not only faster than 4G but also capable of handling many more devices, which promises a huge boom for the Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities and all kinds of connectivity... However, there is still plenty of work to be done
AI Events - Rumours from the trade show floor
After of a couple of weeks sunning and sailplane racing in Florida it was straight back into the saddle for a London-based Quarterly Business Review and the excellent "Rise of AI" event in Berlin... Following a year of attending various international AI events I'm starting to develop a feel for their differing textures and here is my current evaluation...
Heavy metal and tag lines – Rumours from the trade show floor
On the cusp of spring I regularly refresh my GPU technology suntan at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose... This year was fascinating as the speed and scale of both AI and Virtual Reality industries has leapt forward... Here are my takeaways..
HPC and AI collusion – Rumours from the trade show floor
Recently I've garnered much of my blog inspiration from industry events... February has been no exception and I benefited from a fascinating day earlier in the month at the HPC and Big Data conference in London, just a stone's throw from the Houses of Parliament... Here are some of my observations from my discussions there..