AI Driving a Digital Transformation Across Industry

During the re:MARS conference in Las Vegas this week, GE Healthcare, Intel, and a number of other ecosystem partners emerged at the forefront of a new age of technology democratisation that is taking artificial intelligence (AI) from prototype to production.

AI is driving a digital transformation across industry sectors that is every bit as powerful and profound as how electricity was when Edison invented and revolutionized the industry. Healthcare, retail, industrial, automotive, robotics, and smart cities applications are already putting AI to work. Jonathan Ballon Vice President, Internet of Things Group, and heading a team-in artificial intelligence and deep learning applications with computer vision capabilities, supported by software tools & a robust ecosystem- at Intel, summed up the key aspects of AI discussed at the conference.

GE Healthcare is using Intel processors and the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit to implement AI algorithms for enhancing imaging. The OpenVINO toolkit, Intel’s visual inference and neural network optimization software development kit (SDK), is designed to extend workloads and optimize performance across Intel® Vision Products, a comprehensive portfolio of AI-enabling processors and accelerators. GE Healthcare, for example, has optimized its AI algorithms to scan X-ray imagery, reducing the time it takes to detect a collapsed lung to within seconds at the point of care.

Keith Bigelow, General Manager & Senior Vice President AI & Analytics, GE Healthcare said, “Our Edison intelligence platform uses the OpenVINO toolkit API to deploy algorithms directly on our medical devices – harnessing the computing power of the Intel CPU that is already present and delivering sub-second inferencing times.”

Robotics is at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0. Autonomous robots are increasingly capable of guiding products from ordering to production to delivery. ABI research projects that the compound annual growth rate for commercial robots will be 63.2 percent between 2017 and 2027.

The OpenVINO toolkit will be significant in adding visual intelligence to robotics with its latest and first-ever fully automated computer vision annotation tool. It is powerful and easy-to-use and helps prevent hardware overheating by managing the allocation of resources between CPU/GPU and VPU.

UP Squared RoboMaker Developer Kit which is slated for roll-out later this month also garnered attention and is a collaborative between Intel and Aaeon-Amazon’s Web Services. It uses powerful Intel processors, vision accelerators, and RealSense cameras that give developers a simple way to add proven AI capabilities to their edge computing applications.

As the IoT continues to evolve, one of the most promising applications for improving our daily lives is smart cities, which will integrate AI into the fabric of everyday life. Smart city mobility solutions, for example, include smart parking, traffic management, and public transit optimization. In one study, we found that AI-driven traffic management systems could save commuters up to three weeks of time per year.

Intel and its IoT partner ecosystem are leading the way with edge-to-cloud solutions optimized for data-intensive workloads across industry sectors. From smart cities to smart factories, AI is now the common denominator for collaboration among machines, humans, and enterprise systems.