The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organisation promoting open-source development, has launched a new artificial intelligence development competition with $100,000 in prize money.
The Linux Foundation’s “Acumos AI Challenge” will be sponsored by AT&T and Tech Mahindra, which are putting up the prize money.
The Acumos AI Challenge is an open source developer competition seeking innovative, ground-breaking artificial intelligence solutions from students, developers, and data scientists.
The Acumos AI Challenge will foster the development of AI models for the Acumos AI Project, an AI project of The Linux Foundation and supported by The Linux Foundation's LF Deep Learning Foundation.
AT&T and Tech Mahindra are awarding $100,000 in prizes, as well as the chance for finalists to travel to San Francisco to pitch their solutions during the finals on September 11, 2018.
All eligible AI solutions will be available as open source in the Acumos Marketplace.
Mazin Gilbert, VP of advanced technology, AT&T, says: “We created the Acumos AI Challenge to recognise developers who are paving the future of AI development, and helping to accelerate AI adoption and innovation.”
The Acumos AI Project is a federated platform for managing AI and machine learning (ML) applications and sharing AI models.
AT&T and Tech Mahindra contributed the initial Acumos code, now freely available for download, to the new LF Deep Learning Foundation, a project of The Linux Foundation that supports open source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning.
With the Acumos platform, developers and data scientists gain a new industry standard for making AI applications and models reusable and easily accessible.
Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation executive director, says: “This challenge provides a fantastic opportunity for developers to start to dig into Acumos in order to ramp up adoption and collaboration.
“The Acumos AI project was started by the LF Deep Learning Foundation community in order to provide a platform for developers and data scientists to freely share AI models and applications, so they are reusable and easily accessible.”
The Acumos AI Challenge says it welcomes AI solutions across “all use cases”.
Examples include, but are not limited to:
- 5G and software-defined networking – Apps that improve the overall performance and efficiencies of 5G networks and Software-Defined Networking.
- Media and entertainment – AI models targeting a media or entertainment use case. Examples include solutions for broadcast media, internet, film, social media, ad campaign analysis, video and image recognition, speech and sound recognition, video insight tools and more.
- Security – AI apps around network security use cases such as advanced threat protection, cyber security, IoT security, etc.
- Enterprise solutions – AI models targeting an enterprise use case, including solutions for Automotive, Home Automation, Infrastructure and IoT.
The top three teams will each receive $25,000 cash, plus a trip to the finals in San Francisco in September. The team that wins the finale will take home an additional $25,000 grand prize, for a total of $50,000.
Ashish Julka, senior vice president, Tech Mahindra, says: “The Acumos AI Challenge is an opportunity for the AI development community to create cutting-edge solutions with Acumos.
“We can tackle large problems with Acumos, and this initiative will yield innovative ideas to accelerate AI adoption across enterprises, and help them stay efficient and profitable.”
The Acumos AI Challenge is accepting submissions between May 31 to August 5, 2018.
The competition is open to US, District of Columbia and Puerto Rico residents of a majority age.
Teams are required to submit a working AI model, test dataset and a demo video under three minutes.
