Baidu is a company whose name may be unfamiliar to you…unless you speak Chinese, that is, in which case it'll likely be very recognizable. As China's leading search engine, according to Wikipedia, the company's focus is not only on indexing website text but also multimedia content, such as audio files, still images and video clips. It's in these latter areas where computer vision fits in, enabling automated analysis and identification of the various objects embedded within the visual information. And to date, the company has partnered with multiple Embedded Vision Alliance members to boost image search speed, such as FPGA providers Altera and Xilinx, and GPU supplier NVIDIA.
It's fitting, then, that a Baidu representative is delivering one of the keynotes at the upcoming Embedded Vision Summit. Dr. Ren Wu is a distinguished scientist at Baidu's Institute of Deep Learning (IDL), well known for his pioneering research in using GPUs, FPGAs and other coprocessors to accelerate "big data" analytics, as well as for his contributions to large-scale clustering algorithms via GPUs.
Dr. Wu has recently won recognition for his work on Deep Image, Baidu’s image recognition system based on deep learning techniques using convolutional neural networks. In January 2015, Baidu announced that Deep Image had bested Google on the ImageNet benchmark. Prior to joining Baidu, Dr. Wu served as the chief software architect of Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) at AMD. Earlier, he was a senior scientist at HP Labs and the principal researcher at HP Lab's CUDA Research Center.
The Embedded Vision Summit, taking place May 12, 2015 at the Santa Clara (California) Convention Center, is a technical educational forum for product creators interested in incorporating visual intelligence into electronic systems and software. Accompanying partial- and full-day workshops will occur on both May 11 and 13. Register today, while the "early bird" limited-time 20% discount is still available!
