by Angela Guess

A recent release out of the company states, “Baidu, Inc., the leading Chinese language Internet search provider, today announced it will release an open source software platform for the deep learning community.  The software will be released on GitHub on Sept. 30 with full documentation and specs. A pre-release alpha version is available now. Originally developed for internal use by and for Baidu’s own engineers, the platform provides an intuitive and powerful interface for data handling and specifying model structure. Its ease of use makes it a natural starting point for programmers and enthusiasts who want to apply deep learning to their projects and products.”

The release goes on, “The platform, codenamed ‘PaddlePaddle,’ has been used to develop a range of Baidu’s leading-edge products and technologies in areas such as advertising, search ranking, large-scale image classification, optical character recognition and machine translation. The announcement was made at the annual Baidu World conference by Andrew Ng, Baidu chief scientist, who said, ‘PaddlePaddle opens up technology widely used by Baidu to programmers looking for easy-to-learn and easy-to-use tools to build their own deep learning applications’.”

Xu Wei, Baidu distinguished scientist and leader of PaddlePaddle development, commented, ‘With this platform, designing a deep learning model is like writing pseudocode. Engineers can focus on the high-level structure of their model without worrying about the low-level details. We expect it to be useful to programmers who want to quickly apply deep learning models to problems in areas that can really benefit from AI, such as health care and finance.”

Read more at Marketwired.

Photo credit: Baidu