Microsoft Upgrades its Cognitive ToolKit 2.0 to accelerate Deep Learning

According to a recent press release by Microsoft, Cognitive Toolkit 2.0 is all set to upgrade its deep learning framework for AI. “The 2.0 version of the toolkit is now in full release,” said Chris Basoglu, a partner engineering manager at Microsoft.

The latest Cognitive Toolkit 2.0 has been developed to enhance the learning of deep neural networks and various machine learning methods.These are used by engineers and Microsoft researchers for the organization’s breakthrough speech recognition system, that can recognize the words contained in a discussion as well as when coming from a person.

This Toolkit 2.0 supports Python language and Keras, a user-friendly open-source neural network API library, working on deep learning applications. By supporting the latest versions, NVIDIA’s Deep Learning SDK and NVIDIA Volta, an advanced graphical processing unit architecture will continue to accelerate training capabilities by the Cognitive Toolkit.

This Toolkit is a part of Microsoft’s vision to make AI technology available to everyone, everywhere.By using this toolkit, developers can approach cloud computing applications via APIs, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft Cognitive Services.

“Originally, people handwrote their own mathematical functions and created their own neural networks with their own private code and figured out how to feed it with data all by themselves,” said Basoglu. “But now the data is so large, the algorithms are so complex and optimization across multiple GPUs, CPUs and machines is so prohibitive that it is not feasible for someone to write their own. They need tools,” he added.

With this 2.0 Cognitive Toolkit, Microsoft has updated its deep learning framework, to make AI accessible.This toolkit is open source and can be availed here.