NVIDIA Partners Showcase Innovation at AI Champions Summit

by Charlotte Han

NVIDIA named 15 of its partners “AI Innovators of the Year” in recognition of their work, as well as their vision and commitment to the new era of artificial intelligence.

The partners, hailing from across Europe, were feted at NVIDIA’s inaugural AI Champions Summit, in Amsterdam, held earlier this month to celebrate AI innovation within the NVIDIA Partner Network (NPN) and the power of the NVIDIA DGX family.

Providing opportunities to discover, network and learn, the two-day summit included product training, live demonstrations and an awards ceremony.

Bringing Innovation to the Fore

Summit attendees explored cutting-edge use cases and learnt from the experiences of other partners through a series of presentations.

First to take to the stage was Pure Storage, which presented how their new AIRI — AI-Ready Infrastructure — can simplify and accelerate the deployment of AI infrastructure at scale.

Next up was Herbert Ten Have, CEO of Fizyr, a RoboValley-based company and spin-off from TU Delft. Ten Have presented Fizyr’s solution for automating logistics, object recognition and quality control using robotics and deep learning. Fizyr even brought its 600 kilogram robotic arm to show the power of their AI tech.

Fizyr’s robotic arm wasn’t the only application attendees could witness live. Xomnia Partner and CCO Pieter Boon, applied research scientist Paul van Hagen and data scientist David Woudenberg brought realism to their discussion of building a self-driving boat, powered by NVIDIA’s Jetson TX2, by hosting attendees on a trip along Amsterdam famous canals on the very boat.

Aboard Xomnia’s self-driving boat, powered by NVIDIA Jetson TX2.

On the summit’s second day, participants were greeted with another presentation and live demonstration by Robovision CEO Jonathan Berthe. Robovision specializes in industrial deep learning and computer vision. One of its key applications involves sorting plants by different shapes as they pass along a conveyor belt.

Carlo Nardone, one of NVIDIA’s deep learning solution architects, introduced DGX-2, the first single server capable of delivering two petaflops of computational power. It’s a scalable architecture built on NVIDIA NVSwitch, so data scientists can take on the world’s most complex AI challenges.

The summit concluded with the award ceremony celebrating the partners’ involvement in the NVIDIA ecosystem.