Under the partnership, the two companies will collaborate on integrated, enterprise-ready AI/ML solutions. Cloudian will provide the limitlessly scalable on-premises storage systems that bring hyperscale technology to the data centre, while Skymind’s Deeplearning4j recognises patterns in massive amounts of data to provide actionable intelligence for companies.
Industries benefitting from the Cloudian/Skymind partnership will include health care, fraud detection for financial services, security, robotics and others.
Data management is an integral part of the AI/ML landscape. According to IDC, spending on cognitive-related servers and storage will total $1.9 billion in 2017. Global spending on cognitive and AI solutions will continue to see significant corporate investment over the next several years, achieving a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 54.4 per cent, IDC projects.?
“Cloudian and Skymind help organisations extract actionable information from vast pools of unstructured data,” said Michael Tso, CEO and co-founder of Cloudian. “Training data is the foundation of AI and ML. More training data and better metadata tagging result in quicker, more effective learning, making data the dynamic asset that is the key to unlocking AI and ML’s business impact.”
The first solution resulting from the partnership is a security monitoring tool that identifies likely network attacks. The solution uses pattern recognition to identify suspicious network traffic. Users can see both the source and the destination of the attack, helping to simplify countermeasures. Cloudian is supplying the data management that supports the training environment, the algorithm development and its ongoing refinement.
“Deep learning can produce state-of-the-art accuracy on many problems, and it requires large datasets to do that,” said Chris Nicholson, CEO of Skymind. “That's why it makes sense for a deep-learning company like Skymind to partner with a hyperscale storage provider like Cloudian. These are two crucial parts of a larger solution."
Organisations are poised for rapid adoption of AI and ML as Skymind and other suppliers develop the toolkits and support expertise that make cutting-edge technology widely accessible. With AI and ML growth, however, data storage challenges follow, as organisations manage massive and rapidly growing training data.
The utility of Cloudian’s hyperscale storage for AI was previously demonstrated in 2016, when the company partnered with Dentsu and Intel to launch the world’s first digital signage system with advertisements targeting specific demographics via machine learning. As cars approached the roadside LED billboards, Cloudian’s HyperStore technology allowed Dentsu to change advertisements in real time based on the year, make and model of passing vehicles.
Skymind’s technology already has demonstrated its power, as well. The municipal government of Fuzhou, China, is working with Skymind to help predict heart disease among its citizens using ultrasound videos with 80 exabytes of data. The project included the construction of a new data centre as well as a large GPU cluster.
Skymind also has helped several major global banks and telecoms build ultra-fast fraud detection solutions. Skymind’s neural net model server returns results in nanoseconds, and, with the proper dataset to train on, its algorithms can attain human-level accuracy in their predictions.
