[Best of January] Intel Open-sources Deep Learning Library, IBM Adds TensorFlow Support and Google's AI Codes AI Software

The round-up post for December 2016 covered McKinsey's report on data science, Deepfield's Acquisition by Nokia and AWS Managed Services. Chip giant Intel has open-sourced BigDL, a deep learning framework that runs as a Spark job on top of Hadoop. It has been designed to leverage pre-built Spark clusters to run deep learning algorithms and makes it easy to load big datasets. The BigDL framework has support for Spark versions 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0 and and provides option to embed deep learning in existing Spark programs.Although modeling of the framework is based on Torch, tests show significant performance improvement in comparison to Torch when running on Xeon servers. It also performs better than other open source frameworks like Caffe and TensorFlow.