NEWS

Dr. Yu Hirate, Senior Manager of RIT, gave the keynote speech for the opening seminar on ABCI (AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure) and killer app development at Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Kuramae Hall on July 31. Th ABCI is the world’s first large-scale Open AI Computing Infrastructure, constructed and operated by National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

During his speech, Dr. Hirate discussed RIT’s initiatives to improve customer value using machine and deep learning, including transitions of product genre estimation schemes in product data structuring. Rakuten Alris, created in collaboration with Rakuten’s big data and recommender system in Rakuten Ichiba, is already increasing the quality of online shopping with prospective targeting. Furthermore, he introduced demonstration experiments which explore how face recognition is satisfying the customer experience.

The application of deep learning algorithms is a common feature among all initiatives. He concluded that graphic processing units (GPU) is essential to speed up deep learning models and emphasized that computing infrastructures will have a profound effect on leveraging performance.