AI

AI Foundation delivers third Acumos AI software release, which includes work with ONAP and O-RAN

The LF AI Foundation has delivered its third software release for its Acumos AI Project, which includes integration with ONAP and O-RAN. The third release, which is called "Clio," includes features that were designed to more easily onboard AI models, as well as design and manage support for pluggable frameworks and enable federation with ONAP and O-RAN.

The LF AI Foundation, which was previously known as LF the Deep Learning Foundation, was launched last year to spur innovation across artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning not just in the telecom industry, but across other industries as well.

RELATED: AI Foundation offers second helping of Acumos with Boreas release

The first Acumos release, Athena, came out in November of last year followed by the Boreas release in June.

In regards to ONAP, which is an automation and orchestration platform, the Acumos artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models can now be used for virtualized network elements and optimization. The Acumos AI/ML models can also be deployed in O-RAN RIC as XApp microservices to help optimize virtualized radio access networks (RAN).

“Orange is proud to contribute to the LF AI Acumos project as we are convinced that this open source machine learning platform will cover some important future AI needs of telecom operators in the field of 5G and virtualized networks,” said Emmanuel Lugagne Delpon, SVP Orange Labs Networks and Group CTO, in a statement. “With Clio, a new step has been passed toward the full automated deployment of AI model in open source platform such as ONAP and ORAN, and we are very impatient to use these new features in our Orange AI Marketplace."

Orange is using Acumos for the creation of its AI marketplace, and will integrate the Clio release with ONAP in order to test it in ONAP OpenLab and 5G research platform Plug'in. 

Clio also sports new features to help data scientists create, integrate and deploy NiFi data pipelines. NiFi is a system of improving data through filtering with the help of point source security. 

With Clio, companies can publish commercial models and negotiate license agreements for the use of their models. There's also a new license usage manager feature that enables the support of license entitlements for Acumos models.

Clio also features enhanced platform adaptation on Kubernetes through integration of a Jenkins server as a workflow engine. Acumos now supports customization to meet operator needs in mission-critical business functions such as how Acumos ML solutions are assessed for compliance with license and security policies, and where Acumos ML solutions are deployed for use in Kubernetes environments.

AT&T originally developed Acumos with Tech Mahindra two years ago prior to putting it into open source within the Linux Foundation. AT&T has deployed Acumos for about a year now across customer care, network security and other aspects of its business.

Tech Mahindra is integrating Acumos across a number of its initiatives, including an AI marketplace of AI models across a range of industry verticals.