Video: Scalable Deep Learning with Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK)

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In this video from the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Sayan Pathak and Cha Zhing present: Fast and Scalable Deep Learning with Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK).

“Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) is a production-grade, open-source, deep-learning library. In the spirit of democratizing AI tools, CNTK embraces fully open development, is available on GitHub, and provides support for both Windows and Linux. The recent 2.0 release (currently in release candidate) packs in several enhancements—most notably Python/C++ API support, easy-to-onboard tutorials (as Python notebooks) and examples, and an easy-to-use Layers interface. These enhancements, combined with unparalleled scalability on NVIDIA hardware, were demonstrated by both NVIDIA at SuperComputing 2016 and Cray at NIPS 2016. These enhancements from the CNTK supported Microsoft in its recent breakthrough in speech recognition, reaching human parity in conversational speech. The toolkit is used in all kinds of deep learning, including image, video, speech, and text data. The speakers will discuss the current features of the toolkit’s release and its application to deep learning projects.”

Microsoft AI researchers are striving to create intelligent machines that complement human reasoning and enrich human experiences and capabilities. At the core, is the ability to harness the explosion of digital data and computational power with advanced algorithms that extend the ability for machines to learn, reason, sense and understand—enabling collaborative and natural interactions between machines and humans. We are seeing widespread investments in AI which are advancing the state of the art in machine intelligence and perception, enabling computers to interpret what they see, to communicate in natural language, to answer complex questions, and to interact with their environment. In addition to technological advances, researchers and thought leaders need to be concerned with the ethics and societal impact of intelligent technologies.

Sayan Pathak, PhD, is a principal machine learning scientist in the Cognitive Toolkit (formerly CNTK) team at Microsoft. He has published and commercialized cutting-edge computer vision and machine learning technology applied to medical imaging, neuroscience, computational advertising, and social network domains. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked at Allen Institute for Brain Science. He has been a consultant to several startups and principal investigator on several US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants. He has been a faculty member at the University of Washington for 15 years and has been affiliate professor in CSE at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, for more than four years.

Dr. Cha Zhang is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and he currently manages the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) team. He received BS and MS degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China both in electronic engineering, and holds a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining the CNTK team, he spent more than 10 years developing audio/image/video processing and machine learning techniques, and has published over 80 technical papers and holds 20+ US patents. He won the best paper award at ICME 2007 and the best student paper award at ICME 2010. He was the program co-chair for VCIP 2012, and the general co-chair for ICME 2016. He currently serves as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.

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