Monthly Archives: May 2023

As a medical doctor in Nigeria, Tobi Olatunji knows the stress of practicing in Africa’s busy hospitals. As a machine-learning scientist, he has a prescription for it.

“I worked at one of West Africa’s largest hospitals, where I would routinely see more than 30 patients a day —  it’s a very hard job,” said Olatunji.

The need to write detailed patient notes and fill out forms makes it even harder. Paper records slowed the pace of medical research, too.

In his first years of practice, Olatunji imagined a program to plow through the mounds of paperwork, freeing doctors to help more patients.

It’s been a journey, but that software is available today from his company, Intron Health, a member of the NVIDIA Inception program, which nurtures cutting-edge startups.

A Side Trip in Tech

With encouragement from med school mentors, Olatunji got a master’s degree in medical informatics from the University of San Francisco and another in computer science at Georgia Tech. He started working as a machine-learning scientist in the U.S. by day and writing code on nights and weekends to help digitize Africa’s hospitals.

A pilot test during the pandemic hit a snag.

The first few doctors to use the code took 45 minutes to finish their patient notes. Feeling awkward in front of a keyboard, some health workers said they prefer pen and paper.

“We made a hard decision to invest in natural language processing and speech recognition,” he said. It’s technology he was already familiar with in his day job.

Building AI Models

“The combination of medical terminology and thick African accents produced horrible results with most existing speech-to-text software, so we knew there would be no shortcut to training our own models,” he said.

The Intron team evaluated several commercial and open-source speech recognition frameworks and large language models before choosing to build with NVIDIA NeMo, a software framework for text-based generative AI. In addition, the resulting models were trained on NVIDIA GPUs in the cloud.

“We initially tried to train with CPUs as the cheapest option, but it took forever, so we started with a single GPU and eventually grew to using several of them in the cloud,” he said.

The resulting Transcribe app captures doctors’ dictated messages with more than 92% accuracy across more than 200 African accents. It slashes the time they spend on paperwork by 6x on average, according to an ongoing study Intron is conducting across hospitals in four African countries.

“Even the doctor with the fastest typing skills in the study got a 40% speedup,” he said of the software now in use at several hospitals across Africa.

Listening to Africa’s Voices

Olatunji knew his models needed high quality audio data. So, the company created an app to capture sound bites of medical terms spoken in different accents.

To date, the app’s gathered more than a million clips from more than 7,000 people across 24 countries, including 13 African nations. It’s one of the largest datasets of its type, parts of which have been released as open source to support African speech research.

Today, Intron refreshes its models every other month as more data comes in.

Nurturing Diversity in Medtech

Very little research exists on speech recognition for African accents in a clinical setting. So, working with Africa’s tech communities like DSN, Masakhane and Zindi, Intron launched AfriSpeech-200, a developer challenge to kickstart research using its data.

Similarly, for all its sophistication, medtech lags in diversity and inclusion, so Olatunji recently launched an effort that addresses that issue, too.

Bio-RAMP Lab is a global community of minority researchers working on problems they care about at the intersection of AI and healthcare. The group already has a half dozen papers under review at major conferences.

“For seven years, I was the only Black person on every team I worked on,” he said. “There were no Black scientists or managers, even in my job interviews.”

Meanwhile, Intron is even helping hospitals in Africa find creative ways to acquire the hardware they need. It’s another challenge on the way to opening up huge opportunities.

“Once healthcare data gets digitized, you unlock a whole new world for research into areas like predictive models that can be early warning systems for epidemics — we can’t do it without data,” Olatunji said.

Watch a masterclass (starting at 20:30) with Olatunji, HuggingFace and NVIDIA on AI for speech recognition.

Make gaming a priority this GFN Thursday — time’s running out to upgrade to a GeForce NOW Priority six-month membership at 40% off the normal price. Find out how new Priority members are using the cloud to get their game on.

Plus, the week brings updates for some of the hottest games in the GeForce NOW library, and four more titles join the list.

GeForce NOW RTX 4080 SuperPODs are now live for Ultimate members in Atlanta, where the gamers game. Follow along with the server rollout, and upgrade today for the Ultimate cloud gaming experience.

Priority Check

Through Sunday, May 21, save 40% on a six-month Priority membership for $29.99, normally $49.99.

Priority memberships are perfect for those looking to try GeForce NOW or lock in a lower price for a half-year. Priority members get higher access to GeForce gaming servers, meaning less wait times than free members.

Members who claimed this offer in its first week alone played over 1,000 different titles in the GeForce NOW library, for 30,000+ streamed hours. That means these Priority members skipped the line by more than 500 hours.

They also played the best of PC gaming across multiple devices — PCs, Macs, mobile devices and smart TVs, plus new categories of devices made possible by the cloud, like gaming Chromebooks and cloud gaming handheld devices. And they experienced the cinematic quality of RTX ON in supported titles.

With more than 1,600 titles in the GeForce NOW library, there’s something for everyone to play. Jump into squad-based action in Fortnite or Destiny 2, bring home the victory League of Legends or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and explore in open-world role-playing games like Genshin Impact and Cyberpunk 2077. With GeForce NOW Priority, members can get straight into the action.

But don’t wait: This offer ends on Sunday, May 21, so make it a priority to upgrade today.

Game On

GFN Thursday means more games for more gamers. This week brings new additions to the GeForce NOW library, and new updates for the hottest games.

Apex Legends: Arsenal, the latest season in EA and Respawn Entertainment’s battle royale FPS, is available this week for GeForce NOW members. Meet the newest playable Legend, Ballistic, who’s come out of retirement to teach the young pups some respect. Battle through an updated World’s Edge map, hone your skills in the newly updated Firing Range and progress through the new Weapon Mastery system.

In addition, Occupy Mars, the latest open-world sandbox game from Pyramid Games, joins the GeForce NOW library this week. Explore and colonize Mars, building a home base and discovering new regions. Grow crops, conduct mining operations and survive on an unforgiving planet. As all sci-fi films that take place on Mars have shown, things don’t always go as planned. Players must learn to cope and survive on the red planet.

For more action, take a look at what’s joining the GeForce NOW library this week:

• Voidtrain (New release on Steam, May 9)
• Occupy Mars: The Game (New release on Steam, May 10)
• Far Cry 6 (New Release Steam, May 11)
• TT Isle of Man: Ride on the Edge 3 (New release on Steam, May 11)

Ultimate members can now enable real-time ray tracing in Fortnite. The island’s never looked so good.

What are you playing this weekend? We’ve got a little challenge for you this week. Let us know your response on Twitter or in the comments below.

Replace a word in a video game title with “cloud.”

We’ll go first: Cloud of Legends

— NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) May 10, 2023

For telcos around the world, one of the biggest challenges to upgrading networks has always been the question, “If you build it, will they come?”

Asia’s leading telco, Singtel, believes the key to helping customers innovate with AI across industries — for everything from traffic and video analytics to conversational AI avatars powered by large language models (LLMs) — is to offer multi-access edge compute services on its high-speed, ultra-low-latency 5G network.

Multi-access edge computing, or MEC, moves the computing of traffic and services from a centralized cloud to the edge of the network, where it’s closer to the customer. Doing so reduces network latency and lowers costs through sharing of network resources.

Singtel is collaborating with Microsoft and NVIDIA to combine AI and 5G, so enterprises can boost their innovation and productivity. Using NVIDIA’s full-stack accelerated computing platform optimized for Microsoft Azure Public MEC, the telco is creating solutions that enable customers to leverage AI video analytics for multiple use cases and to deploy 5G conversational avatars powered by LLMs.

From Sea to Shore

Singtel has been rolling out enterprise 5G and MEC across ports, airports, manufacturing facilities and other locations. In addition to running low-latency applications at the edge using Singtel’s 5G network, the solution has the potential to transform operations in sectors such as public safety, urban planning, healthcare, banking, civil service, transportation and logistics. It also offers high security for public sector customers and better performance for end users, enabling new intelligent edge scenarios.

Customers can use these capabilities through Microsoft Azure, only paying for the amount of compute and storage they use for the duration in which they use it. This replicates the cloud consumption model at the network edge and lets users save on additional operational overhead.

Edge Technologies

Singtel is working with video analytics software-makers participating in NVIDIA Inception, a free program that offers startups go-to-market support, expertise and technology. These ISVs will be able to use the NVIDIA Jetson Orin module for edge AI and robotics in conjunction with Microsoft MEC to identify traffic flows at airports and other high-population areas, retail video analytics and other use cases.

Singtel and NVIDIA are also showcasing their technology and solutions, including a real-time LLM-powered avatar developed by system integrator Quantiphi and based on NVIDIA Omniverse digital twin technology, at a May 11 launch event in Singapore. The avatar, built with NVIDIA Riva speech AI and the NeMo Megatron transformer model, enables people to interact in natural language on any topic of interest. Businesses can deploy these avatars anywhere over 5G.

Using Singtel’s high-speed, low-latency 5G — combined with NVIDIA AI accelerated infrastructure and capabilities — enterprises can explore use cases on everything from computer vision and mixed reality to autonomous guided vehicles.

Singtel plans to expand these new capabilities beyond Singapore to other countries and affiliated telcos, as well. This collaboration will help redefine what’s possible through the powerful combination of compute and next-generation networks, unlocking new operational efficiencies, revenue streams and customer experiences.