27 July, 2017
Nvidia-BDI Joint Deep Learning WorkshopHKUST Big Data Institute (BDI) is excited to partner with NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute, which has established itself as the leading provider of processing power for AI software, in launching its first-ever practical deep learning workshop on 27 July 2017.
Deep learning is a hot topic in both academia and industry since it has recently dramatically improved the state-of-the-art in areas such as speech recognition, computer vision, predicting the activity of drug molecules, and many other machine learning tasks. The basic idea in deep learning is to automatically learn to represent data in multiple layers of increasing abstraction, thus helping to discover intricate structure in large datasets.
The much anticipated day on 27 July started with a free open-to-all talk session in the morning. Prof Kai Chen, Associate Professor of CSE, was the host to give the welcome remarks and introduced Mr. Raymond Teh, VP of WWFO Asia Pacific, Nvidia, and Prof Qiang Yang, Director of BDI and Head of CSE, to give the opening remarks to around 100 attendees. Afterwards, Mr. Aik Beng Ng, Senior Solution Architect of Nvidia, spoke on the Deep Learning, AI Revolution – The Next Computing Paradigm. Then, Prof Yang made the introduction while Prof Chen's research student, Li Chen, followed with talking on the Deep Learning Research in HKUST and the BDI.
Participants were treated with buffet lunch outside the venue after the morning talks, where they chatted with the speaker and one another heatedly on the development of deep learning.
The afternoon session drew much more participants than the venue could possibly cater for. Eventually on the first-come-first-served principle, 50 participants were admitted to be the finalists and could pay to join the workshop hosted by both Mr. Aik Beng Ng and Mr. Andrew Liu, Deep Learning Solution Architect of Nvidia. This workshop provided an excellent opportunity to learn fundamentals of deep learning, starting from basic workflows in deep learning, using TensorFlow for building intelligent applications, as well as practical acceleration solutions for large-scale TensorFlow deployments. The participants brought home with fruitful yields of the basics of the deep learning techniques.
Founded by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993, NVIDIA’s invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined modern computer graphics, and revolutionized parallel computing. More recently, GPU deep learning ignited modern AI — the next era of computing — with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots, and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world. NVIDIA just topped the latest 2017 edition of MIT Technology Review’s list of “50 Smartest Companies” in June, whereas Tesla Motors topped the 2015’s list, and Amazon topped last year’s.
If you want to watch the morning session of the workshop, please click here