The Linux Foundation's AI Foundation project has dropped its second software release for its Acumos project, which includes a new licensing framework and partner catalogs.
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.
Following up on the first release in November, which was called Athena, the second release, which is called Boreas, has added training and license verification for artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) models and apps for use by community developers and data scientists.
"The key part about Boreas, or Acumos in general, is trying to address the real need to move AI as a more general purpose tool across the broader company and not just be applied in specialty areas," said Jack Murray, assistant vice president of inventive science, intelligent systems and incubation within AT&T Labs.
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AT&T originally developed Acumos with Tech Mahindra two years ago prior to putting it into open source within the Linux Foundation. Murray said that AT&T has deployed Acumos for about a year now across customer care, network security and "many different aspects of the business."
Prior to the Boreas release, the Acumos framework and marketplace included two types of licensing: Apache and open source.
"With this release, we allow you to attach commercial software licenses and begin the journey to real commercialization opportunities for models within the framework," said Murray, who formerly served as the technical steering committee chair for Acumos, and who is also active in LF Networking's Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP.) "What people are really looking to do is bring their models to a commercialization path, and so they were hesitant to put models in until they could do it under their own licensing."
Boreas also includes more capabilities for creating partner catalogs. Murray said two peer companies could set up a catalog whereby they share the licensing terms in order to streamline and facilitate the model sharing of AI and ML models.
Boreas also includes support for Portable Format Analytics (PFA), which provides a means for analytic applications to describe and exchange predictive models produced by analytics and machine learning algorithms.
In addition to AT&T, Orange is using Acumos for the creation of an AI marketplace, and will integrate the upcoming Cleo release, which will be out in November, with ONAP in order to test it in ONAP OpenLab and 5G research platform Plug'in. Orange pitched in the on-boarding updates into the Boreas release.
Tech Mahindra is integrating Acumos across a number of its initiatives, including an AI marketplace of AI models across a range of industry verticals.
"The broader goal is we're really trying to create an opportunity for everyone to be able to participate in a marketplace where we can exchange the best solutions through AI and machine learning for meeting different companies' needs and finding a business model that really drives the community," Murray said. "We'll do that by sharing the best models. We're also looking to make it simple and easy, but high quality while building relationships."
While Acumos was the first announced project for the AI Foundation, it has since added projects backed by Uber, Baidu and Tencent.