This summer, Intel has been collaborating with the NASA Frontier Development Lab (FDL), an AI R&D accelerator targeting knowledge gaps useful to the space program. The NASA FDL, hosted at the SETI Institute, was established to apply AI to five specific challenges in areas relevant to the space program: Planetary Defense (defending the Earth from potentially hazardous asteroids), Space Weather (better predicting solar activity) and Space Resources (locating and accessing the resources we'll need to go back to the moon and expand into the solar system). Earlier this summer, we introduced you to this collaboration, and we have exciting updates to share. The NASA FDL team successfully applied the Intel Nervana Deep Learning platform to automate the creation of lunar maps at our Moon's poles – a critical step in helping both identify potential landing sites and navigation in the shadowed regions of the moon. Here, permanent darkness and extremely low temperatures make for an ideal location for water ice (and other volatiles), but highly challenging conditions for future missions that would be impossible without detailed mapping.

"Deep Learning has had a huge impact on computer science, making it possible to explore new frontiers of research and to develop amazingly useful products that millions of people use every day." With innovation driving business success, the demand for community-based, open-source software that incorporates AI & deep learning is taking over start-ups and enterprises alike. We've rounded up a few successful deep learning technologies that are making a big impact. TensorFlow is an open source software library that uses data flow graphs for numerical computation. Nodes in the graph represent mathematical operations, while the graph edges represent the multidimensional data arrays communicated between them.

The future of technology is artificial intelligence, but before it can radically change the world, we need to develop proper hardware that can give the machines the ability to learn. To that end, The Wall Street Journal reports that Intel is working with Facebook and a number of other companies on a new processor called Nervana --also known as the Nervana Neural Network Processor. The chip is the result of work done by Intel Nervana, and was designed to accelerate the AI learning process known as deep learning, in which a computer is taught to recognize objects, patterns, speech, and complex concepts so that it can mimic the same learning capabilities exhibited by humans. Intel's partners are helping "fine tune" Nervana, while Facebook has started taking a deeper look at the processor and realizing its capabilities. "[They said], 'Hey, this really could change the way we think about artificial intelligence. And help us really steer how we build software and hardware," said Intel Chief Executive Brian Krzanich at The WSJ D.Live conference on Tuesday.

Gal is a research engineer at the Intel Nervana algorithms team. He has a great passion for AI, and specifically for training and implementing Reinforcement Learning agents. He has optimized and trained low precision neural networks, enabling deep learning inference, on various Intel devices. He has been with Intel for 10 years, and before joining Intel Nervana, was mainly focused on power management algorithms optimization for Intel CPUs. In his spare time, Gal enjoys baking sourdough breads, hiking and watching movies with his wife.

The State Government of South Australia announced their contract with Solar Reserve to build a 150MW solar thermal power plant for Port Augusta, South Australia. This is an addition to the state-owned gas plant and the world's largest lithium ion battery recently announced contract with Tesla. According to State Premier Jay Weatherhill, this solar thermal plant "biggest of its kind in the world" and "will help make our energy grid more secure." This Aurora Solar Energy Project will be ready in 2020 and is expected to supply 100% of the government's anticipated power needs. IntelAI has been collaborating with NASA FDL's Lunar Water and Volatiles team in a 9-week program this year. Working with Intel's team and their deep learning technologies, Intel Nervana, NASA is looking to accelerate the development of a software solution to take AI to the moon.

O'Reilly and Intel Nervana are presenting the Artificial Intelligence Conference in San Francisco, September 17-20, 2017. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode of the Data Show, I speak with Naveen Rao, VP and GM of the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel. In an earlier episode, we learned that scaling current deep learning models requires innovations in both software and hardware.

Deep learning is unlocking tremendous economic value across various market sectors. Individual data scientists can draw from several open source frameworks and basic hardware resources during the very initial investigative phases but quickly require significant hardware and software resources to build and deploy production models. Intel Nervana has built a competitive deep learning platform to make it easy for data scientists to start from the iterative, investigatory phase and take models all the way to deployment. Nervana's platform is designed for speed and scale, and serves as a catalyst for all types of organizations to benefit from the full potential of deep learning. Example of supported applications include but not limited to automotive speech interfaces, image search, language translation, agricultural robotics and genomics, financial document summarization, and finding anomalies in IoT data.