KnuEdge
An AI Upheaval

As one of the longest-serving administrators of NASA, Daniel Goldin had a celebrated career under three presidential administrations. In 2001, he left NASA and engaged in robotics research at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California. Under the mentorship of Nobel Prize winner Neurobiologist Dr. Gerald Edelman, he built a robot that could play soccer and intelligently converse with other robots. His focus on neuro-biologically-based technology not only made a huge upheaval in the world of HPC but also led to the conception of KnuEdge—an innovative and trusted leader in machine intelligence technology.

Today, the company works on a next-gen cloud platform that helps enterprises and individuals develop and deliver artificial intelligence (AI) based experiences. KnuEdge envisions a future where AI pervades everyday mundane activities of people and believes that enterprises that are equipped to deliver such experiences to their end users are the ones bound to excel. “We believe that the right combination of machine intelligence and the human mind is very significant and positive,” says Kevin Nickels, Head of Product Development, KnuEdge. “AI’s future is going to be very ubiquitous. People using it will probably not even realize how extraordinary it sounds right now.”

Focusing on what was prophesized to be a twenty trillion dollar industry, Nickels beholds AI to be the most significant wave of revolution after the birth of the internet and definitely of higher magnitudes. To that end, KnuEdge powers innovation in AI, reaching out to independent and enterprise developers who wish to create and deploy rich AI-based experiences either for consumers or for their own employees. They are building a platform that accrues fragmented spurts of early innovation in AI, aspiring to position themselves at the forefront.

KnuEdge platform, which is expected to launch by early 2018, endorses an immense focus on scalability, especially from a multi-tenancy standpoint. With a 50 member team working on its development, backed by twelve years of research and 100 million dollars in funding, the company has built an architecture to sustain a scalability which Nickels likens to ‘a giant machine in the sky’ with connected cores communicating with one another.

We believe that the right combination of machine intelligence and the human mind is very significant and positive

The platform manifests itself in a co-creation kind of approach where KnuEdge actively works with independent and enterprise developers from insurance, finance, telecommunications, and healthcare sectors. These industries were selected since they wanted to go after what impacted people’s lives the most. Being very developer-focused, they noticed that these highly regulated environments have the most realistic development pain points and frustrations that KnuEdge platform can address.

The platform allows AI and ML workloads and algorithms to be imported into its HPC environment without any modification—a significant step ahead from the shortcomings of today’s user experience metrics. It also streamlines execution of ML algorithms to significantly reduce the cost and time to get them up and running. Another advantage that is a welcome benefit for developers is its ability to ingest, manage, and consume phenomenal amounts of data from a wide range of sources.

Goldin’s management of the Mars Mission, Hubble, and the International Space Station projects at NASA seamlessly reflects in KnuEdge’s culture. The company invites anyone who is passionate and excels at what they do. When asked about how the platform has shaped up so far, Nickels notes that what they are doing is truly revolutionary in the HPC ecosystem.