‘Our goal is to ensure that India can take a leading role in the AI revolution’

In an email interview Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, NVIDIA - South Asia tells BW CIO World about his plans to provide skilling to Indian developers, for new technologies such as deep learning and artificial intelligence.

BW: Why is the developer community so important for NVIDIA? How does it work with the developer community elsewhere in the world?

Vishal Dhupar: Analyst firm IDC estimates that 80 percent of all applications will have an AI component by 2020. There is a real demand for developers who not only understand artificial intelligence, but who know how to apply it in commercial applications.

The NVIDIA Developer Program is an important part of NVIDIA's commitment to the Development community, and joining is your first step in establishing a working relationship with NVIDIA Engineering.

This program enables the delivery of an extensive range of NVIDIA software and technologies to the development community, and two-way communication about issues, enhancements, usage and future needs.

BW: What are your plans to train developers in India?

Vishal Dhupar: We want to play a pivotal role in training developers and researchers in new-age skills such as artificial intelligence, and deep learning and its implications on big data, IoT, robotics, and more.

We look at onboarding developers through a variety of initiatives and programs that are aimed to onboard 100,000 developers over next one year across 250 institutions in India. We are doing an Ideathon and planning  10 city workshops across academic institutes. Our latest partnership with an institution is also to enable students get exposure to industry experts, along with the training and insight to help solve some of the world’s most challenging problems with deep learning.

NVIDIA’s Academic Programs Team is dedicated to empowering and collaborating with professors and researchers at universities worldwide. The company aims to inspire cutting-edge technological innovation and to find new ways of enhancing faculty research as well as the teaching and learning experience. We achieve this through a variety of initiatives and programs - GPU Educators Program, GPU Grant Program, and GPU Centers.

PARAM SHAVAK DL - It is a powerful Deep Learning development and training system, designed exclusively for academic institutions and research organizations.

NVIDIA recently launched the Deep Learning Institute in India, training over 400 developers in the latest deep learning techniques.

BW: What programs does NVIDIA have to encourage/train/incentivize developers in India (and abroad)?

Vishal Dhupar: Bringing the next wave of learners up to speed isn’t something you can do overnight. It will take teamwork to get the job done. We along with other MNC captives and academic institutions are working towards building the AI expertise into business capabilities, and driving innovation across multiple industries, which will require a major upskilling of the existing workforce.

Through NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI), we aim to touch almost 3 million developers and engineers, and impart education to skill tomorrow’s talent, today. NVIDIA has trained more than 7,000 developers on both basic and advanced concepts in DL, through hands-on training sessions as well as online courses. We are working with world-leading online learning organizations, including Coursera and Udacity, to bring AI within reach of more developers. These partnerships include DLI-certified courses in areas such as self-driving cars, robotics and healthcare.

BW: What special abilities and talent does NVIDIA see in Indian developers?

Vishal Dhupar: The world is unquestionably changing in rapid and dramatic ways, and the demand for Machine Learning engineers is going to keep increasing exponentially. NVIDIA is responsible for the underlying computing technology that makes deep learning a reality. Here’s what we see in a majority of the developers in India:

* Highly qualified young developers
* Good communication skills
*Sincere and focused.

Our ultimate goal is to ensure that India and the region as a whole is equipped to take a leading role in the Artificial Intelligence revolution.

BW: How is NVIDIA collaborating with academic institutions in India?

Vishal Dhupar: We collaborated with IIT-Guwahati and IIT-Roorkee to develop skills in high performance computing (HPC) programming and deep learning. With this collaboration, IIT-G and IIT-R aim to train over 250 students in the next year through workshops and sessions to develop skills in deep learning, the parallel computing programming model.

IIT-G also used NVIDIA’s GPU for breast cancer detection and diagnosis. Their lab has a NVIDIA Tesla K20c GPU, which we are heavily using for training computational pathology models. For the HER2 scoring project, the students also had access to a laptop with an NVIDIA GeForce GPU. Access to these GPUs is instrumental in training deep learning models for computational pathology.

The GPU Centre of Excellence at IIT-Bombay is using equipment and grants provided by NVIDIA to support a number of research projects in the areas of Atmosphere and Ocean modeling, Bioinformatics, Circuit Simulation, Computer/GPU architecture, Computer Graphics and Vision, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Global Optimization, Molecular Dynamics, and Reliable Computing.

Computing is an important facet of research at the Department of Biotechnology. IIT Madras, with several groups working in areas of computational biology, bioinformatics, computational biophysics, computational neuroscience, modelling and simulation.

We collaborated with the IIT Delhi to establish a research lab to help the country reach its goal of achieving exascale computing by 2017. The new Exascale Research Lab (ERL), co-developed by NVIDIA and IIT Delhi, will help the nation achieve this goal by providing advanced ongoing research, testing, and technology development in a variety of areas, including processor architecture, circuits, memory architecture, high-speed signaling, programming models, algorithms, and applications.