The Linux Foundation | 08 August 2018
Foundation welcomes 5 new members and new Governing Board Chair Mazin Gilbert to expand global footprint to accelerate AI innovation
SAN FRANCISCO, August 8, 2018 – The LF Deep Learning Foundation, an umbrella organization of The Linux Foundation that supports and sustains open source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, today announced five new members: Ciena, DiDi, Intel, Orange and Red Hat. The support of these new members will provide additional resources to the community to develop and expand open source AI, ML and DL projects, such as the Acumos AI Project, the foundation’s comprehensive platform for AI model discovery, development and sharing.
These companies join founding members Amdocs, AT&T, B.Yond, Baidu, Huawei, Nokia, Tech Mahindra, Tencent, Univa and ZTE. The LF Deep Learning Foundation is a neutral space for harmonization and acceleration of separate technical projects focused on AI, ML and DL technologies.
“We are very pleased to build off the launch momentum of the LF Deep Learning Foundation and welcome new members with vast resources and technical expertise to support our growing community and ecosystem of AI projects,” said Lisbeth McNabb, Chief Operating Officer of The Linux Foundation.
Mazin Gilbert, Vice President of Advanced Technology and Systems at AT&T, has also been elected to the role of Governing Board Chair of LF Deep Learning. This position leads the board in supporting various AI and ML open source projects, including infrastructure and support initiatives related to each project.
“The Deep Learning Foundation is a significant achievement by the open source community to drive harmonization among tools and platforms in deep learning and artificial intelligence,” said Mazin Gilbert, Vice President of Advanced Technology and Systems at AT&T. “This effort will enable an open marketplace of analytics and machine learning capabilities to help expedite adoption and deployments of DL solutions worldwide.”
LF Deep Learning will also host a half day workshop at the upcoming Open Source Summit, August 28 in Vancouver, BC, which will provide a scope review of Acumos AI project, an AI full stack overview, overview of new projects and details of how to get involved.
Additionally, the inaugural Acumos AI Day was recently hosted by Orange at their Paris offices and garnered so much interest, there will be a worldwide tour of these events.
Support Quotes from New LF Deep Learning Members
“The progression of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies calls for a shift in how we design and implement networks and services,” said Adan Pope Chief Information Technology Officer at Ciena. “Joining the LF Deep Learning community supports our AI strategy, reinforces our mission to drive intelligent network and service automation, and puts us in a stronger position to help shape the future of this evolving industry.”
“DiDi is excited to support the LF Deep Learning Foundation, which is helping fill an important gap in the AI space by providing a space for the open source community to innovate,” said Wensong Zhang, Senior Vice President at DiDi. “We look forward to collaborating with the foundation and global open source and AI communities to develop useful solutions now and into the future.”
“Intel is a longtime believer in democratizing technology and making it accessible to all developers. We’re taking that same approach to our AI work today and look forward to working closely with the LF Deep Learning Foundation and AI community,” said Carlos Morales, Senior Director of Deep Learning Systems, AI Product Group, Intel.
“We believe that the LF Deep Learning Foundation and the Acumos project will accelerate the development of telecom use cases, in an open source environment for communication services, networks, security, and customer care,” said Jamil Chawki, Director IT of Cloud Standards and Open Source at Orange. “By providing a common framework for machine learning and deep learning, LFDL will contribute to lowering the barriers to AI innovation for Telcos.”
“Deep learning has the potential to change everything about how we learn from data,” said Chris Wright, Vice President and CTO at Red Hat. “Open source communities are at the heart of advancing deep learning frameworks and we’re excited to see further collaboration with the LF Deep Learning Foundation around model discovery, development, and lifecycles, and bringing open source software development best practices to deep learning models.”
About LF Deep Learning
The LF Deep Learning Foundation, a Linux Foundation project, accelerates and sustains the growth of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning open source projects. The initiative’s Acumos AI Project is a platform and open source framework that makes it easy to build, share and deploy AI models. Backed by many of the world’s largest technology leaders, LF Deep Learning is a neutral space for harmonization and ecosystem engagement to advance AI, DL and ML innovation. To get involved with the LF Deep Learning Foundation, please visit https://www.deeplearningfoundation.org.
About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.
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