Strengthening our commitment towards creating and nurturing AI talent in India, Intel brought its premier AI developer event, the Intel® AI DevCon (Intel® AIDC), to Bengaluru, India for the very first time on the 8th of August.
Intel AI DevCon: Reflecting Intel's Holistic AI Approach for India
The Intel AIDC was an action-filled day dedicated to showcasing the transformative potential of AI and blurred the line between theory and real-world implementations. We brought together data scientists, industry experts, academia, researchers, and developers to network, share knowledge, and discuss the latest developments in the world of AI.
Gadi Singer, Intel Vice President and Architecture General Manager of the AI Products Group, kicked off the day with a detailed discussion showing how deep learning is coming of age in 2019 and 2020. In his presentation, Gadi highlighted that there has been a marked shift from proprietary solutions towards what he calls “democratization of data science”. Amir Khosrowshahi, Intel Vice President and CTO of the AI Products Group explained how Intel is enabling developers to achieve their vision with essential software tools.
Intel AIDC highlighted India’s incredible potential for AI technology development. Prakash Mallya, Intel India Managing Director of the Sales and Marketing Group, discussed how Intel is actively collaborating with the local ecosystem for AI innovation.
Our six local customer walk-ons put the spotlight on local use-cases and partner success stories, highlighting the diversity of Intel’s hardware and software product portfolio. This included Vinay Kumar Sankarapu from Arya.ai* introducing how Arya.ai achieved Inferencing Performance on Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors using Intel distribution for Python*and Intel optimization for TensorFlow* to reduce claim processing time, and Dr. Tapati Bandopadhyay from Wipro* HOLMES showed how Intel® Xeon® processors are powering their solution. We also highlighted the work from many top cloud service providers, including Vivek Seshadri from Microsoft* Labs showing how Intel® FPGAs are being used in Project Brainwave and Atanu Roy from Amazon* demonstrating how AI is unleashed with easily accessible tools and capabilities. Lastly, we covered topics as unique as AI for healthcare, and public safety with Ravi Ramaswamy from Philips* Healthcare showing how AI is used to make healthcare accessible to a billion Indians, and Dr. CV Jawahar from IIIT Hyderabad discussing how traffic datasets have been built to help make Indian roads safer.
Joining Hands with Key Industry Players to Accelerate AI Use-cases
20+ deep-dive technical sessions from Intel and partners helped developers learn more about local as well global AI use-cases:
- Mohit Kumar, Flipkart* - “AI for e-commerce in India”
- Santanu Bhattacharya, Airtel* - “Big data and artificial intelligence in the telecom industry”
- Premchander Rao, Intel – “Intelligent video analytics on Intel® architecture”
- CV Jawahar, IIIT Hyderabad* - “AI, computer vision and emerging opportunities”
- Tapati Bandopadhyay and Vinutha B.N., Wipro* - “From chip to applied AI: approach, techniques, successes, and lessons in building explainable AI”
- Atanu Roy, Amazon* - “Supercharge your ML model with Amazon SageMaker* and infer at the edge using AWS DeepLens*”
- Banu Nagasundaram, Intel – “Advancing AI performance using Intel® Xeon® Scalable systems”
- Hongwei Yi, Intel – “Intel AI case study sharing”
- Milind Pandit, Intel – “Semantic parsing - Natural Language Understanding in Python*”
- Sandeep Jayaprasad Alur, Microsoft* - “Deep Neural Networks – let us build an image/currency classifier”
- Manish Singhal, pi Ventures* - “AI for the next 6 billion”
In addition, Prakash Mallya moderated an engaging fireside chat on “AI as a market transformation opportunity” with a distinguished panel and focused on helping developers unravel the potential of AI. The panelists included Manish Singhal (co-founder, pi Ventures*), Mohit Kumar (senior principal data scientist, Flipkart*), Punit Shukla (NITI Aayog*), and Dr. Tapati Bandopadhyay (General Manager and Practice Head, Wipro* HOLMES).
Through a series of Lightning Sessions, we also showcased local use-cases from software startups spanning five industry verticals. The sessions included content from:
- Vibhor Varshney (senior AI/ML engineer, Artivatic Data Labs Pvt. Ltd*) on AI for insurance
- Ananth Nagaraj (co-founder, Gnani.ai*) on automating enterprise customer care
- Soumya Ranjan (data scientist, Gramener*) and Srikanth Gopalakrishnan (analyst, Gramener) on how AI is becoming ubiquitous
- Tathagato Rai Dastidar (co-founder and CTO, SigTuple*) on AI in healthcare, particularly pathology and ophthalmology
- Nagachetan (CEO and chief scientist, Visio Ingenii Ltd.*) on machine vision solutions using AI
Giving Developers the Tools to Think Big
Along with sessions from experts at Intel, the AI DevCon event brought out valuable insights on the future of AI, and enabled developers to strategize their next move in AI, as we at Intel continue our efforts to support their needs.
Maximizing efforts at training developers in the latest frameworks, hands-on lab sessions were conducted all through the day. Also on the agenda was a series of demos and showcases of Intel's hardware use-cases including text analytics, and image segmentation with Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, low power video analytics with Intel® Movidius™, and accelerated inference using Intel® FPGA and Intel® Speech Enabling Developer Kit. The software tools demos included BigDL on Apache Spark*, the OpenVINO™ Toolkit, and Intel® Distribution for Python*.
The event also saw a number of engaging partner demos including:
- Avaamo* - “Natural language-based customer service, product guidance, and x-sell/up-sell”
- AWS – “Machine Learning on AWS”
- Julia Computing* - “How to solve two language problems in AI”
- Lenovo* - “Delivering augmented intelligence”
- Mphasis* - “DeepInsights, Mphasis Cognitive”
- NxtGen* - “Exploring AlaaS”
- Wipro – “Wipro HOLMES E-KYC”
The success of our first-ever AI DevCon in India was a testament to the strength of our local collaborations and a vibrant local ecosystem of developers and start-ups who are keen to innovate with AI. We are committed to our vision of enabling local developers with our software tools and hardware to accelerate the AI revolution in India.
Missed the Event?
Videos of all sessions are now available on the Intel AIDC website. Check out some of excellent keynote and session replays here!
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Mary is the Community Manager for this site. She likes to bike, and do college and career coaching for high school students in her spare time.