The NVIDIA Blog

GPU Visionaries: Deep Learning Experts Make MIT’s ‘Innovators Under 35’ List

Posted: 20 Aug 2015 10:46 AM PDT

They're young. They're visionary. And they're using GPUs to change the world.

MIT Technology Review revealed this week its annual "35 Innovators Under 35," which lists young technologists using today's emerging technologies to transform tomorrow's world.

Two of the five winners in the Visionary category are harnessing the computing power of NVIDIA GPUs to drive their artificial intelligence applications. (The other categories are Entrepreneurs, Humanitarians, Inventors and Pioneers.)

Advancing Google Brain

Ilya Sutskever, 29, left high school early to begin university, and ultimately became the protégé of the godfather of deep learning, Geoffrey Hinton. They invented Supervision – a deep neural network that leapfrogged previous systems and was used to win the 2012 ImageNet Visual Recognition Challenge.

Sutskever is now a key member of the Google Brain research team, focused on developing deep learning algorithms that could mimic human brains and vision by training artificial neural networks to recognize objects – similar to how the human brain does.

"When you look at something, you know what it is in a fraction of a second," Sutskever says. "And yet our neurons operate extremely slowly. That means your brain must only need a modest number of parallel computations. An artificial neural network is nothing but a fairly small number of very parallel, simple computations."

In a talk last month, Sutskever mentioned there have been 47 deep learning-related product launches in the last two years by Google, such as photo search, Android speech, StreetView and ads placement.

Multilingual Speech Recognition

The other visionary is Adam Coates, 33, who's the director of Baidu's Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Lab. Its mission is to create technology that will have an impact on at least 100 million people. Coates was one of the early proponents of applying powerful high-performance computing techniques to deep learning. Today, deep learning is the foundation of their research.

"I believe we can use deep learning and HPC to teach computers, devices and appliances to interact with people far better than they do today." — Adam Coates, AI researcher at Baidu

His lab, which focuses on speech recognition, recently presented a new model for handling voice queries in Mandarin. Deep Speech, which runs on a powerful GPU-based system, was publicly announced late last year – initially focused on English speech recognition. Today, it has "multi-lingual" capabilities and boasts an accuracy rate of 94 percent.

The complete list of honorees is on TechnologyReview.com and will be featured in the September/October issue print magazine that hits newsstands worldwide on Sept. 1.

For more on how GPUs are fueling advances in deep learning, check out the keynote address by Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu, at our GPU Technology Conference in March.

The post GPU Visionaries: Deep Learning Experts Make MIT's 'Innovators Under 35' List appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

Battle Ready: Find Your Edge in MOBA Gaming with New GeForce GTX 950

Posted: 20 Aug 2015 06:00 AM PDT

With the market for multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games booming, we're introducing the GeForce GTX 950 GPU to arm MOBA gamers with a competitive edge.

In just three years the number of MOBA gamers has doubled to 80 million. The eSports industry is now worth an estimated $612 million. There are more than 2,100 MOBA tournaments annually. And last month's The International Dota 2 Championships — with its $18.4 million prize pool — is among the world’s richest sporting events on the planet.

MOBA is mainstream. And the GTX 950 brings a level of responsiveness to MOBA gamers that only pros used to afford.

Winning Happens in a Fraction of a Second

If you're wading into the sprawling battles of games like Dota 2, League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm, you want to be able to see — and respond to — the action first. "Responsiveness is king," says Alexander "Abaxial" Haibel, head coach of Brazilian eSports team INTZ. "It's critical for my team to game on high-performance systems which provide that."

That's why NVIDIA is the preferred GPU for competitive MOBA players. Last month, for example, eSports athletes competed for a piece of The International's multimillion-dollar prize pool on systems equipped with specially selected NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPUs and G-SYNC displays.

The GTX 950 is a high-performance gaming GPU that brings an incredible level of responsiveness to MOBA gamers. In addition to raw performance, when you use GeForce Experience with your new GTX 950, you can optimize your game and system settings for reduced latency. It's a powerful combination that slashes the response time from mouse click to onscreen action by almost half.

Share Your Victories with GeForce Experience

MOBA games are a team sport, where sharing is a big part of the fun. New features coming to GeForce Experience next month via our early access beta will make sharing your victories easier and better than ever.

Two cool highlights: Gamers will be able to record and upload videos to YouTube and broadcast to Twitch from an easy-to-access in-game overlay. Also, GameStream Co-op lets gamers stream their game over the internet to a friend and play together cooperatively — just as if you were sitting next to each other.

Gaming Starts Here

If you're looking for a new GPU to play the latest games faster than the most powerful console, the GeForce GTX 950 is the place to start.

Based on Maxwell, the world's most advanced GPU architecture, the GTX 950 offers triple the performance of our GeForce GTX 650 on many games. So you can play modern games in 1080p HD at a smooth 60 frames per second. And with double the power efficiency of previous generations, it stays cool and quiet even when the gaming heats up.

Grab a GeForce GTX 950 and GeForce Experience and you'll be able to record, broadcast and stream your games to friends — or to the world, through Twitch.tv — with a click.

The GeForce GTX 950 retails for $159. It's available now, worldwide.

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