Amdocs, AT&T, B.Yond, Baidu, Huawei, Nokia, Tech Mahindra, Tencent, Univa, and ZTE come together to speed adoption of deep learning, artificial intelligence, and machine learning

LOS ANGELES, March 26, 2018 — (PRNewswire) —   (Open Networking Summit) – The Linux Foundation today launched the LF Deep Learning Foundation, an umbrella organization that will support and sustain open source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning while striving to make these critical new technologies available to developers and data scientists everywhere.

Founding members of LF Deep Learning include Amdocs, AT&T, B.Yond, Baidu, Huawei, Nokia, Tech Mahindra, Tencent, Univa, and ZTE. With LF Deep Learning, members are working to create a neutral space where makers and sustainers of tools and infrastructure can interact and harmonize their efforts and accelerate the broad adoption of deep learning technologies.

"We are excited to offer a deep learning foundation that can drive long-term strategy and support for a host of projects in the AI, machine learning, and deep learning ecosystems," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. "With LF Deep Learning, we are launching the Acumos AI Project, a comprehensive platform for AI model discovery, development and sharing. In addition, we are pleased to announce that Baidu and Tencent each intend to contribute projects to LF Deep Learning. LF Deep Learning enables the open source community to support entire ecosystems of projects in these spaces, and we invite the open source community to join us in this effort."

As part of the LF Deep Learning launch, The Linux Foundation today announced the Acumos AI Project, a platform for the development, discovery, and sharing of AI models and AI workflows. Initial code for the Acumos AI Project has been contributed by AT&T and Tech Mahindra.

The project strives to make the power of AI accessible to all by making it easy to create, share, discover, and apply machine learning, deep learning, and analytics models. The Linux Foundation will host the Acumos AI platform and the Acumos Marketplace moving forward with the goal of nurturing an active, large ecosystem around the project to sustain it over the long term. Code is available for download as of today.

In addition to the Acumos AI Project, LF Deep Learning anticipates future project contributions from Baidu and Tencent, among others. Baidu's EDL project enhances Kubernetes with the feature of elastic scheduling and uses PaddlePaddle's fault-tolerable feature to significantly improve the overall utilization of Kubernetes clusters. Tencent's Angel project, a high-performance distributed machine-learning platform jointly developed by Tencent and Peking University, is tuned for big data/models. It is capable of supporting over a billion parameters.

Industry Support for LF Deep Learning

Amdocs, AT&T, B.Yond, Baidu, Huawei, Nokia, Tech Mahindra, Tencent, Univa, and ZTE are founding members of the new foundation.

"Amdocs is proud to be a founding member of Linux Foundation's Deep Learning and the Acumos project as they signify a new AI frontier bringing intelligence and automation to the communications and media industry. AI is already transforming business models and delivering contextual customer engagements, creating new opportunities for service providers, content developers and other industry players to build the enterprise applications that will run our increasingly digital society. Amdocs has been investing in AI for years, with a particular focus in delivering personalized digital engagements, and by providing core systems of engagement that impact billions of consumers worldwide. As a result, we are well positioned to contribute valuable insights to this project--both from the traditional customer experience and network perspective, as well as from the entertainment and media perspective, enabled by our media division which works with over one thousand content creators and distributors world-wide. What makes Acumos so exciting is that the industry leaders will be bringing innovative data-driven insights and technology from global sources to empower experiences with cutting-edge AI-enabled capabilities."
-- Anthony Goonetilleke, group president of Amdocs Technology

"AT&T is honored to be a founding member of the LF Deep Learning Foundation. This organization will encourage collaboration and harmonization, paving the way for accelerated innovation and increased adoption of these new technologies."  
-- Mazin Gilbert, vice president of Advanced Technology at AT&T Labs

"At B.Yond, we believe artificial intelligence (AI) is a central enabler of The Infinite Network and is required to deliver the low-touch network management needed to support emerging applications. We are excited to join the LF Deep Learning Foundation project and help drive innovation with the Acumos AI Project." 
-- Paul-Andre Raymond, senior vice president, Technology, B.Yond

"Baidu is very excited to join LFDL as a founding member to help the global collaboration in AI area. And we will contribute the EDL project to LF Deep Learning, which provides elastic job scheduling and fault tolerable features for Deep Learning."
-- Zhongyi Tan, open source architect, Baidu

"Huawei is very pleased to be one of the initial Premier members of the LF Deep Learning Foundation. Deep Learning is key to enhance consumer experience and to help our customers implement digital transformation. Huawei continues to increase our open source investments and collaborate with the open source community to advance the application and the development of Deep Learning." 
-- Xiao Ran, vice president of strategy and industry development, Huawei

"Nokia considers AI as a game-changer for our customers. We are already seeing breakthrough results from AI/ML in our networks and service offerings. Nokia is looking forward to supporting Acumos and influencing the platform's evolving architecture."
-- Henri Tervonen, CTO, Mobile Networks, Nokia

"At Tech Mahindra, our people have been deeply invested in contribution to open source and building AI software. We are elated to be the founding member of LF Deep Learning and have taken a lead in contributing initial code to the Acumos AI Project. With the launch of Acumos, the vision to make AI accessible to a wider community of users across diverse industries and hence making it easy to implement AI applications are now a reality. The potent force of AI, data and cloud that the Acumos platform inherently acts upon will help realize the transformation journey that Tech Mahindra and its clients have embarked on."
-- Manish Vyas, president, communications business & chief executive, network services, Tech Mahindra

"We are excited to join as a founding member of LF Deep Learning and we look forward to helping drive collaboration and development in the broader AI, machine learning, and deep learning space. To further enable these efforts, we intend to contribute the Angel project to LF Deep Learning. The Angel project, jointly developed by Tencent and Peking University, is a high-performance distributed machine-learning platform. Tuned for big data/models, the Angel project is capable of supporting over a billion parameters."
-- Yongsheng Liu, general manager of AI Department, Tencent

"The LF Deep Learning Foundation comes at an integral moment when many of Univa's customers, who manage workloads on many of the largest machine learning clusters in the world, are developing their strategies for deep learning. We're excited to see these companies benefit from the technology, collaboration and support from this open source community, whether they are validating new pilot projects or applying deep learning in production across their organization."
-- Gary Tyreman, president & CEO, Univa Corporation

"As the world's leading communications solutions provider, on the basis of the uSmartInsight platform, we provide a full range of big data, AI, potent algorithm, and end-to-end solutions to help telecom operators construct an intelligent network in the future."
-- Wei Meng, open source planning director, ZTE

The Linux Foundation expects LF Deep Learning to bring in a wide variety of projects, including tool kits, inferencing engines, and infrastructure deployment projects that leverage modern cloud native technologies to make deep learning accessible, scalable, and affordable to all. To get involved with LF Deep Learning, please visit https://deeplearning.linuxfoundation.org .