Google Cloud AutoML @ Google to make AI accessible to every firm

Unveils Cloud AutoML to help those with limited expertise build custom models

Artificial intelligence is no more going to remain the secret sauce of some of the biggest technology companies. Google on Wednesday unveiled ‘Cloud AutoML’, which would help businesses with limited machine learning expertise start building their own high-quality custom models using advanced techniques provided by the Internet giant. 

Range of applications

The applications range from automating product attributes like patterns and necklines styles for clothing companies to helping various organisations conserve the world’s wildlife by analysing and tagging millions of images of various animal species.

“There are bigger, greater opportunities waiting to be unlocked by AI,” said Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud, during a webcast with reporters.

Google said the new platform would help less-skilled engineers build powerful AI systems they previously only “dreamed of.”

“AI and machine learning is still a field with high barriers to entry and it requires expertise that (only) few companies can afford on their own,” said Ms. Li, who is also the director of the Artificial Intelligence and Vision Labs at Stanford University.

She said there were perhaps a million data scientists worldwide, which might be using AI services. However, there are an estimated more than 21 million developers worldwide and “we want to make AI accessible to these developers,” she said.

Google’s first ‘Cloud AutoML’ release will be ‘Cloud AutoML Vision,’ a service that makes it faster and easier to create custom machine learning models for image recognition. Its drag-and-drop interface lets enterprises upload images, train and manage models, and then deploy those trained models directly on Google Cloud. “You can create a simple model in minutes,” said Jia Li, head of research and development at Google Cloud AI.

For example, Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has deployed a series of camera traps in the wild that take pictures of passing animals when triggered by heat or motion. The organisation is collaborating with Google’s CloudML team and aims to use their technology to automate the tagging of these images — cutting costs and enabling wider-scale deployments.

When asked about the strategy to implement this technology in India, Rajen Sheth, senior director of product management at Google Cloud AI, said the country was “very strategic” and a “priority market” for the firm. He said a lot of firms here were already using machine learning with really interesting applications. “I think we will find a lot of companies in India that would use it,” said Mr. Sheth.

Source | The Hindu | 18^th January 2018

Regards

Prof. Pralhad Jadhav 

Master of Library & Information Science (NET Qualified) 

Senior Manager @ Knowledge Repository  

Khaitan & Co 

Blog | http://pralhad-fyilibrarian.blogspot.in/  

Website | https://sites.google.com/site/pralhadjadhavlib/home        

Twitter Handle | @Pralhad161978