Petuum: Enabling the eventual integration of AI into the foundation of every industry

While Artificial Intelligence is the booming point of innovation, it unfortunately remains inaccessible to many organizations. Why is that? AI research and development today is more directed in particular specific functions and applications. There are selected few developers who maintain the research as AI is expensive, hard to reproduce, talent-intense, and largely unsustainable. 

When you meet Petuum, AI is redefined. Enterprises are offered an AI software platform where they can develop, build, design, experiment, customize, and operate their own vertical AI solutions. These verticals could be anything- areas in industrial manufacturing and utilities, telecommunications, healthcare, the popular autonomous driving, and even financial services.

The Petuum platform is a unique combination of software infrastructure and ecosystem that’s perfect for enterprises diving in AI. There’s a single platform on which you can build deep learning or machine learning applications. Deploying at any scale or hardware is easy by using large amounts of data. Dive into your line of work- be it edge computing, data centers, IoT or even workstations with Petuum.

Foundation

Petuum’s offerings are better understood when you meet Dr. Eric Xing, the founder, CEO, and chief scientist of Petuum. Dr. Xing is also a professor at the Carnegie Mellon University and is ranked the top CS/AI researcher in the world. He had one mission in mind: “to enable organizations to own, build and become informed users of their AI solutions, without relying on expensive talent.” Together with other scientists, Dr. Xing founded Petuum, which also received $108 million in an investor funding led by SoftBank. In fact, Petuum is one of the highest-funded AI and Machine Learning startups.

Wall of Fame

Dr. Eric P. Xing is a recipient of the following awards: National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science, the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, and also the IBM Open Collaborative Research Faculty Award, as well as several best paper awards. Prof. Xing is a board member of the International Machine Learning Society; he has served as the Program Chair (2014) and General Chair (2019) of the International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML); he is a Fellow of the Association of Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and an IEEE Fellow.

Transforming AI

To work on its mission, Petuum is transforming AI. Petuum strives to make AI as an industrial technology that comes with a complete standardized process. The company works to make AI platforms available with complete building blocks for data processing and ML, customizable reference designs, and software design tools. The end result is that AI solutions are produced in a large-scale with a good level of consistency. The added bonus is lower costs, high task accuracy, and support to data of all sizes.

All of this is achievable through AI engineering supported by training programs done at Petuum. “The Petuum development platform and gallery of AI building blocks work with any programming language and any type of data, allowing managers and analysts to quickly build AI applications without any coding, while engineers and coders can further re-program applications as needed,” says the company website. For its immense innovations, Petuum was honored the prestigious Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum in 2018- one of the only 61 start-ups in the world to be so honored with the title.

Explicitly Innovating

Dr. Eric P. Xing, Founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist

With the above designations, Dr. Eric P. Xing is also a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He also serves or has served the following roles: associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), Annals of Applied Statistics (AOAS), IEEE Journal of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) and the PLoS Journal of Computational Biology; action editor of the Machine Learning Journal (MLJ) and Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR); member of the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Science and Technology (ISAT) advisory group. Dr. Xing is also the Associate Department Head of the Machine Learning Department, founding director of the Center for Machine Learning and Health at Carnegie Mellon University.

His main research interests are the development of machine learning and statistical methodology, and large-scale computational system and architectures, for solving problems involving automated learning, reasoning, and decision-making in high-dimensional, multimodal, and dynamic possible worlds in artificial, biological, and social systems. He completed his undergraduate study at Tsinghua University and holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the State University of New Jersey, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

According to csrankings.org, Professor Xing currently ranks as the #1 computer science (CS) professor worldwide, whose papers (in the most selective CS conferences of all disciplines) collectively have the highest (weighted) acceptance among all computer scientists in the US and global universities during 2008-2018.

“We’ve cleared the AI hurdles so you don’t have to.”

“Petuum lets enterprises easily understand and leverage AI to gain deep insight for better decision-making and improved productivity and efficiency.”