Every month we'll share updates from the School of AI HQ and have some topics and/or demonstrations about AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and other topics in AI. This month we have a guest speaker from IBM to talk about PowerAI Vision and other AI services and tools IBM has to offer. If you'd like to present at a meeting, please reach out to us through the Meetup messages or @cincyai on twitter and we'll get you scheduled.

There has been a revolution brewing in the technology industry. An artificial intelligence (AI) method called deep learning that uses deep or multi-layer neural networks is dramatically improving computer vision and video analytics. So much so that deep learning-based computer vision can now beat human capability in rapidly identifying objects in images. With video technology all around us -- it's this deep learning that can help us process vast amount of data that has been too great to humans alone to process. Now, we at IBM are taking this technology to the next step.

IBM today made a major announcement about new products and services aimed at helping alleviate the roadblocks to AI (artificial intelligence) adoption in the enterprise. It is only a beginning, but it's very interesting in the breadth and comprehensiveness of IBM's plan. On the infrastructure front, they announced enhancements to the AC922 Server, primarily be improved integration of NVIDIA V100 GPUs and NVLink for faster system communications. This server is for the heavy lifting, training of AI models and processing in HPC (High Performance Computing) systems. They also announced the LC921 and LC922 servers aimed at data intensive applications.

In a few months, when the HPC community gathers in Denver for SuperComputing 2017, I expect it will become clear that the supercomputing field is poised to take the next giant step in its evolutionary path. For decades, the HPC community has spoken longingly of efficiently steering simulations, improving the interpretation of complex model outputs and building more efficient and representative models of complex phenomena. And now we are beginning to see these desires realized as researchers and commercial enterprises demonstrate the utility of melding AI with HPC in products and approaches across a broad spectrum of problems and industries. IBM has been focused on merging AI and HPC for some time. Our recently-announced PowerAI Vision is a natural adjunct to HPC simulations producing visual outputs. We announced Distributed Deep Learning, which exploits HPC architecture to achieve noteworthy learning performance, thereby speeding "time-to-insight," and of course, in IBM Watson we have the capability to ingest huge amounts of data to help guide model development or solution interpretation.