by John Murray, Assistant Vice President of Inventive Science, Intelligent Systems and Incubation, AT&T

With the release of Acumos AI in late 2018, the core idea was to create a sustainable open source AI ecosystem by making it easy to create AI products and services using open source technologies in a neutral environment. Acumos AI was aimed squarely at reducing the need for specialists and lowering the barriers to AI.

Fundamentally, lowering barriers to AI means making it easier to create and train models.

The new Boreas release, just announced in June, does exactly that. Users now have readily available tools to create and train models, enabling the full lifecycle of development from model onboarding and designing, to sharing and deploying. Jupyter Notebooks and NiFi, two popular and well-known document and graphics tools, are now integrated in the pipeline. Access by users through an enhanced UX in the portal provide publishing, unpublishing, deploying and onboarding, model building, chaining, and more.

At the same time, AI model suppliers will be able to provide a software license with their models to ensure that the user has acquired the right to use the model. This is key for marketplace-like transactions. Boreas explicitly supports licenses and Right-To-Use for proprietary models. It also now supports license scans of models and metadata.

The new features in Boreas move AI development forward significantly, allowing developers and data scientists who are not AI specialists to develop and deploy apps.

Leadership and Real World Implementations

The LF AI Foundation charter promises to connect members and contributors with the innovative technical projects, companies, and developer communities that are transforming AI and Machine Learning. But the question is always, is it being used? And how does it perform in the real world?

AT&T, Orange and Tech Mahindra are three great examples how Acumos AI has jumped forward quickly in the last 6 months. All three companies are founding members of the LF AI Foundation and have been providing leadership in both development resources and real world implementations of the Acumos AI framework and marketplace. The reach of their current deployments is distinctly international and extremely ambitious.

AT&T – Infusing AI Across Operation – Big and Small

Two years ago, AT&T saw an opportunity to make AI more accessible and reduce barriers to this exciting industry. Together with Tech Mahindra and The Linux Foundation, AT&T developed Acumos AI to serve as an open marketplace for innovators to create and exchange the best AI solutions possible. Two years and two releases later, we’ve seen firsthand the success of this open approach. It’s led to the creation of new solutions from students, developers, startups and several groups across AT&T’s varied business.

At AT&T, we’re not only helping to improve the Acumos AI code for the public, we’re also using it to improve efficiencies in our own organization. In the past year, AT&T has leveraged Acumos models across customer care, network security, and a variety of different aspects of the business. And, with each release comes additional enhancements, capabilities and opportunities to infuse AI across operations – big and small.

Orange – We make AI accessible and ready for 5G

Orange is using Acumos for its new AI Marketplace. Orange is a leading telecommunications company with 273 million customers worldwide and revenue of €41B (2017). The Orange AI Marketplace is an AI app store where developers can publish and share AI services that can be quickly and easily deployed by customers.

Orange has increased involvement in Acumos significantly. Orange’s contributions to Acumos AI include the onboarding enhancements seen in the new Acumos Boreas release. After testing the publication and export of AI model for operations use cases – such as incident detection and tickets classification – Acumos was deployed as the basis for the Orange AI Marketplace.

The second half of 2019 will see even more implementations and further growth by Acumos AI. Please come back to find out more information here on the LF AI Foundation blog covering innovative use cases and key implementations of Acumos AI worldwide.

Acumos was also proposed by Orange as an AI platform for the European research project AI4EU.  The goals of AI4EU are ambitious, including making the promosis of AI “real” for the EU, and creating a collaborative AI European platform to nurture economic growth. Involving 80 partners, covering 21 countries, the project kicked off in January 2019 and will run for three years and it is expected to implement Acumos by the end of 2019.

Tech Mahindra GAiA – Democratizing AI

Tech Mahindra GAiA is the first enterprise-grade open source AI platform. It hosts a marketplace of AI models which can be applied to use cases in multiple industry verticals. These are used as the basis for building, sharing and rapidly deploying AI-driven services and applications to solve business critical problems.

GAiA is available for commercial products and services and supports open source distribution at the same time. Tech Mahindra is aiming to fully democratize AI. The core concept behind GAiA is that the knowledge and expertise around AI should be universally accessible.

The launch of the GAiA platform is in line with Tech Mahindra’s TechMNxt charter which focuses on leveraging next generation technologies like AI to address real world problems and meet the customer’s evolving and dynamic needs.

Getting Involved in the LF AI Foundation and Acumos

What to get involved? It’s easy to get started! You can get involved with specific projects with development, review, events, documentation, and much more. You can participate in the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) by joining the discussions on bi-weekly calls, identifying collaboration opportunities, inviting speakers to outside events, evaluating new projects, and more more, And you can take advantage of marketing and outreach provided by the LF AI Foundation. 

The full “Getting Involved Guide” is available for current and prospective members.

“We’ve written this guide to provide you a complete reference to the LF AI community. You will learn how to engage with your communities of interest, all the different ways you can contribute, and how to get help when you need it. If you have suggestions for enhancing this guide, please get in touch with LF AI staff.”

If you are interested in joining the LF AI Foundation: https://lfai.foundation/about/join/

John Murray Bio

John Murray is the Assistant Vice President of Inventive Science, Intelligent Systems and Incubation at AT&T. He leads the Intelligent Systems and Incubation organization which uses software, platforms, data, analytics and AI and machine learning to deliver solutions that address AT&T’s needs. He is an expert in design and building advanced communications systems and is involved in key initiatives such as ONAP, Acumos, data management, and automation and communications systems.