Microsoft Lifts Restrictions On Deep Learning Toolkit, Moves To GitHub

Microsoft is seeking to spread usage of artificial intelligence (AI) deep learning software by moving its open source Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) on GitHub.

The company first open sourced this toolkit in April 2015, but at the time, it was hosted on Microsoft’s own CodePlex site and was only available under a restrictive academic license.

Microsoft has released its Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) through GitHub on an open source licence, with the stated aim of speeding up artificial intelligence research. According to Microsoft researchers, thanks to better communication capabilities, this new toolkit is faster for speech and image recognition than the four other popular computational toolkits that other developers rely on. Microsoft’s push seems to effectively be meant to play catch with Google’s own offerings by removing its own restrictions of software already readily available to most researchers and institutions. Those other projects Huang is referring to include the likes of Google’s recently open-sourced TensorFlow, as well as projects like Torch, Theano and Caffe.

The team discovered that GPU is efficient in processing algorithms used in technology that can recognize images and movements as well as speak, hear and comprehend speech.

The toolkit, which supports both GPU and CPU, was developed after Huang and his team realized the tools they used were slowing them down as they were trying to improve the way computers understood speech.

The toolkit can scale across more GPU-based machines than other publicly available solutions, making it useful for those with the resources to create their own large cluster of GPU-based computers for major experiments and calculations, as well as researchers on more limited budgets, Microsoft added.

Microsoft’s CNTK framework is now used to work with Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana, as well as Skype’s Translate application with potential to be used in conjunction with Microsoft’s Bing search engine in the near future.

CNTK is part of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s artificial intelligence project and it involves training machines on speech recognition and more.

Today the company is announcing that it’s just made CNTK available to use to other developers on Github. Among other things, Huang claims that CNTK is highly optimized for speed and that it is more efficient than what the competition has to offer on deep learning toolkit front.