A Telecommunication Engineering School teacher of the UVa has been chosen to train students and researchers in Artificial Intelligence techniques.
The teacher and researcher of the University of Valladolid, Mario Martínez Zarzuela, teacher at the Telecommunication Engineering School of Valladolid, has recently received an appointment as DLI University Ambassador by the Deep Learning Institute (DLI) from the company NVIDIA. The DLI goal is to train students and researchers in techniques related with Artificial Intelligence, such as deep neural learning networks and the computer science with a general propose in Graphic processing Units (GPU).
The Ambassadors of the DLI Institute are chosen among a selected group of certificated instructors and they must secure their researching and training experience in these technologies, what assigns a special importance to the UVa researcher appointment, Mario Martínez Zarzuela. His goal will be to give courses in scientific conferences and workshops organized by the DLI, in addition to host an event in the universities. The DLI courses are free for the attendants as long as they certify they are students, researchers or university staff.
As Mario Martínez explains, the Artificial Neural Networks are computer models with a biologic inspiration in them, as well as they work inside the brain, the information transfer and process it with the cooperation of an elevated number of processing units relatively simple: the neurons.
The researching in these systems dates back several decades. Some improvements in the design provided by the technology progress, have allowed the possibility of using the neural networks the last 5 years to solve a growing number of applications with an unprecedented precession: Virtual voice assistants, tools for helping with the clinical diagnosis, vehicles for autonomous driving or artificial intelligence systems able to win a human being in games such as Go.
Companies like Google and Facebook use these networks, called Deep Neural Networks, and promote its use among the researchers and developers.
These networks can learn using examples, as well as human beings do. The application resolution from this point of view differences from the traditional program focus, which consists in writing with group of rules that use informatics language.
Data entries and specific hardware are used for extracting knowledge for the networks: designed processors to make many calculations simultaneously and which reduce the needed time for these systems to learn it. The GPUs invented in the early XXI century and thanks to its computer power could advance in many researching areas. The use of GPUs in artificial intelligence is one of the key factors which has let the design and the use of neural networks to advance.
The first DLI course about artificial intelligence will take place this Thursday 17 of January, in The Telecommunication Engineering School of the University of Valladolid. Its title is: Fundamentals of Deep Learning for Computer Vision. This course has got a big approval, 40 seats have been already filled. This course is oriented for university staff with no knowledge about the issue, but with an interest in having a first contact and evaluate if they can use this techniques for their researching or deciding if they want a deep training.
“It´s just necessary to have a laptop with internet to join the course. The attendants use remotely all the needed calculation infrastructure, including a free GPU of the latest generation for each attendant”, claims Mario Martínez, who announces there will be a high demand of this knowledge in the next years”.
The teacher Mario Martínez Zarzuela has an extended experience as these technologies researcher and teacher. His doctoral dissertation, defended in 2009 and with the title “Neural Architectures for the perceptual segmentation and the Color and texted images recognition about high performances graphic processing units (GPUs)”, is one of the first works realized in lines of research mentioned in this article.
