9 Down, 14 letters: Someone skilled in creating and solving crossword puzzles.
This April, the fastest “cruciverbalist” at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament was Dr.Fill, a crossword puzzle-solving AI program created by Matt Ginsberg.
Dr.Fill perfectly solved the championship puzzle in 49 seconds. The first human champion, Tyler Hinman, filled the 15×15 crossword in exactly three minutes.
Though Ginsberg has published crossword puzzles for the New York Times, he has trouble solving puzzles, even his own. After attending a crossword tournament over a decade ago, Ginsberg decided to create a crossword-solving program to compete against top-tier word nerds.
Ginsberg spoke with NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about his decade-long journey creating Dr.Fill and where he envisions it going in the future.
Key Points From This Episode:
Ginsberg partnered with UC Berkeley’s natural language processing team. By combining their code bases, Dr.Fill outperformed the human competitors at this year’s tournament.
Dr.Fill performs better on unthemed rather than themed puzzles. This is where the natural language group comes into play, helping Dr.Fill interpret clues and difficult crossword themes.
Tweetables:
“I’m looking forward to the crossword tournament next year because I know we’re going to be working hard to make the program better.” — Matt Ginsberg [11:02]
Sam Liang is making things easier for the creators of the NVIDIA AI Podcast — and just about every remote worker. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Otter.ai, which uses AI to produce speech-to-text transcriptions in real time or from recording uploads.
Rochester Institute of Technology computer engineering major Syed Ahmed, a research assistant at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, uses AI to translate between American Sign Language and English. Ahmed trained his algorithm on 1,700 sign language videos.
Serial entrepreneur Andrew Mason is making podcast editing easier and more collaborative with his company, Descript Podcast Studio, which uses AI, natural language processing and automatic speech synthesis.
Ever see a virtual kitchen materialize in real-time? If you caught NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote for our March 2021 GPU Technology Conference you’re no doubt wondering about more than a few of the presentation’s magic tricks.
With the premiere of “Connecting in the Metaverse: The Making of the GTC Keynote,” Wednesday, Aug. 11, at 11 a.m. Pacific time, NVIDIA team members will reveal the story behind the story told at GTC.
Designed to entertain and inform, GTC keynotes are always filled with cutting-edge demos highlighting NVIDIA’s advancements in supercomputing, deep learning and graphics.
This year, however, with NVIDIA’s team working remotely to create a presentation for attendees flocking to an entirely virtual gathering, those technologies were crucial for making the keynote itself.
The highlight: the reveal of Huang’s virtual kitchen, complete with a digital clone of the man himself.
The half-hour documentary film debuting Wednesday tells the tale of the small team of remote artists who were able to blur the line between real and rendered on a tight deadline with NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for connecting 3D worlds into a shared virtual space.
Immediately after the video’s debut, those who are registered for SIGGRAPH can join the team at NVIDIA who will dig into the story told in the video for a live Q&A at 11:30 a.m. Pacific time.
To participate in the panel, register for SIGGRAPH using the code “NVIDIA21” for a free basic pass or $25 off an enhanced or ultimate pass.
You’ll be able to find all the details you’ll need to join the panel once they’re posted on SIGGRAPH’s website.
This GFN Thursday brings in hordes of fun — and a whole lot of orcs. Orcs Must Die! 3, the newest title from the action-packed, orc-slaying series from Robot Entertainment, is joining the GeForce NOW library when it releases tomorrow, Friday, July 23.
In addition, 10 more games are coming to the service this week.
Play Your Games, Your Way
Gaming on GeForce NOW means having instant access to over 1,000 PC games streaming from the cloud. Whether it’s a low-powered PC, Macs, Chromebooks, SHIELD TVs or Android and iOS mobile devices, GeForce NOW supported devices play real PC games with GeForce levels of performance.
And you don’t just get to play real PC versions of games optimized on GeForce NOW compatible devices. The games you play are the ones you own, streaming from popular stores like Steam, Epic Games Store, Ubisoft Connect and GOG.COM. With GeForce NOW, you never have to rebuy a different version of that game to play it on multiple compatible devices.
Members can play awesome PC games, like Orcs Must Die! 3 in high-powered detail and battle across all of their GeForce NOW compatible devices.
Bring the Mayhem
Orcs Must Die! 3 (Steam) challenges players to slice, burn, toss, zap, grind and give it all they’ve got to keep massive hordes of orcs at bay across the battlefield in an effort to secure the castle walls and victory. Battle with a buddy or slay your enemies solo against enormous orc armies with weapons and traps of your choice.
Prepare the catapults — and everything else you’ve got. You’re going to need it to face off against these hordes of orcs.
Players can experience all-new war scenarios that pit players against overwhelming legions of orcs. But don’t worry, players have an arsenal of magic, weapons and new War Machines: traps on an oversized scale that range from mega flip traps that launch orcs ragdolling off the castle walls to mega boom barrel launchers that unleash pyrotechnic glory.
Enjoy a new and exciting story set 20 years after the previous game with fresh characters. Play for glory in weekly challenges to see how long you can survive in Endless Mode to put your name on the leaderboard. Then, survive Scramble Mode and face off against evolving orcs with sinister surprises. Finally, take things a step further in the Drastic Steps campaign as the mayhem takes to the skies against flying orcs.
The enemy is ready to advance, but with GeForce NOW, you can take your preparations with you across nearly all of your devices.
With Orcs Must Die! 3 releasing on Steam and joining the GeForce NOW library, more gamers than ever before can experience the thrill of stomping orcish hordes — regardless of their low-powered rigs.
“We love that our players can experience all of the action and all of the orcs on any GeForce NOW compatible device,” said Patrick Hudson, CEO at developer Robot Entertainment. “It’s great that players who may not have powerful devices can still play the real PC version of our game at orc-slaying power.”
Members can get ready to slay and play Orcs Must Die! 3 on GeForce NOW when it releases tomorrow, July 23.
Game Time
Critics are raving about Death’s Door, joining GeForce NOW day-and-date this week. IGN gave the game a 9/10, praising its mix of Zelda-like exploration puzzles, engaging fast-paced combat, and secret-filled levels.
Orcs Must Die! 3 isn’t the only new game this GFN Thursday. Members can look out for these sweet titles ready to stream this week:
Walk into a store. Grab your stuff. And walk right out again, without stopping to check out.
In just the past three months, California-based AiFi has helped Choice Market increase sales at one of its Denver stores by 20 percent among customers who opted to skip the checkout line.
It allowed Żabka, a Polish convenience store chain, to provide faster checkout for morning train commuters.
It helped pro-racing team Penske and Verizon run a dinky 200-square-foot store at the Indy500, so race fans could quickly get back to the action.
And on Wednesday AiFi announced an expanded partnership with Loop Neighborhood to introduce its computer vision, camera-only platform into stores in California, starting with two Bay Area locations.
AiFi, a member of the NVIDIA Inception accelerator for AI and deep learning startups, has moved out of the proof-of-concept stage and into stores across the world.
Its technology makes shopping more convenient and helps retailers better understand their customers.
AiFi has helped Choice Market increase sales at one of its Denver stores by 20 percent among customers who opted to skip the checkout line.
“Retailers can now get as much information about physical shopping habits as online stores are getting from ecommerce,” said AiFi CEO and co-founder Steve Gu, a veteran of Apple and Google.
AiFi’s ability to analyze shopper habits is even more impressive because its stores don’t need to buy costly sensors and RFID tags.
Instead, the company uses real-time image recognition and edge AI powered by NVIDIA GPUs to recognize the items shoppers select and charge them, usually through an app linked to the customer’s credit card.
It’s not an easy task in busy stores stocked with many hundreds of items, but the five-year-old company’s technology now achieves an accuracy rate of 99 percent.
To date, more than 15 stores worldwide are putting the company’s technology to work. Those stores are already serving satisfied customers who return again and again.
At Choice Market, 60 percent of shoppers who tried the checkout-free option used it again within a month. Twenty percent came back three times.
The computer-vision-powered system uses NVIDIA Metropolis for smart video analytics. It works smoothly alongside the store’s traditional checkout system, and is integrated with the Choice Now app, where customers can shop checkout-free, and place online orders and arrange pickups.
AiFi is revolutionizing retail operations with AI. At the Indy500 auto race earlier this year, Penske Entertainment’s nano-store allowed fans to buy snacks, beverages and merchandise with an app. No need to stop and swipe a credit card.
This speed translates well to any kind of store where people need to slip in and out in a hurry. Żabka partnered with AiFi to open its first public autonomous store in Poznan, Poland, quickly drawing huge amounts of foot traffic from commuters going to and from a nearby train station.
With AiFi integrated with the Żappka App, which has over 5 million users, harried commuters could hustle out the door with a newspaper and a morning coffee.
Żappka partnered with AiFi to open its first public autonomous store in Poznan, Poland.
More stores equipped with AiFi’s technology are coming. In France, the company is working with Carrefour on what the retailer calls its “Flash LabStore,” a frictionless store at its headquarters in Massy.
And in the UK, Britain’s fourth-largest supermarket, Morrisons, is working with AiFi to test out a store with no checkout.
These stores represent a growing number of collaborations with major retailers that see AiFi’s combination of AI and computer vision as the key to a brick and mortar retail renaissance that will ultimately put more goods in front of more customers, in more places.
The final push for the hat trick came down to the wire.
Five minutes before the deadline, the team submitted work in its third and hardest data science competition of the year in recommendation systems. Called RecSys, it’s a relatively new branch of computer science that’s spawned one of the most widely used applications in machine learning, one that helps millions find what they want to watch, buy and play.
The team’s combination of six AI models packed into the contest’s limit of 20 gigabytes all of the smarts it culled from studying 750 million data points. An unusual rule in the competition said the models had to run in less than 24 hours on a single core in a cloud CPU.
They hit the submission button and waited.
Twenty-three hours and 40 minutes later an email arrived: They hit No. 1 on the leaderboard.
“The email came in right under the buzzer — 20 minutes later and we would have timed out,” said Chris Deotte, one of several team members who’s also a grandmaster in Kaggle competitions, the online Olympics of data science.
“We were really on the edge,” said Benedikt Schifferer, a teammate who helps design NVIDIA Merlin, a framework to help users quickly build their own recommendation systems.
GPUs could have busted through the inference job in a fraction of the time. Adapting the work to one CPU core “was like going back to the distant past,” said Gilberto “Giba” Titericz, a Brazil-based Kaggle grandmaster on the team.
In fact, once the competition was over, the team demonstrated the inference job that took nearly 24 hours on a CPU core could run on a single NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU in just five and a half minutes.
Sorting 40M Items a Day
For that competition, Twitter gave participants millions of data points a day for 28 days and asked them to predict which tweets users would like or retweet. It was an industrial-strength challenge from the leading technical conference on RecSys, an event that draws a who’s who of top engineers from Facebook, Google, Spotify and other players.
Part of the RecSys Challenge team (clockwise from upper left): Bo Liu, Benedikt Schifferer, Gilberto Titericz and Chris Deotte.
The discipline is as hard as it is helpful. Recommendation systems fuel our digital economy, serving up suggestions faster and smarter than a traditional search.
Industry challenges help advance the field for everyone, whether they’re seeking the perfect gift for a spouse or trying to find an old friend online.
Three Wins in Five Months
Earlier this year, the full NVIDIA team led a field of 40 in the Booking.com Challenge. They used millions of anonymized data points to correctly predict the final city a vacationer in Europe would choose to visit.
SIGIR challenge winners include (clockwise from upper left) Ronay Ak, Sara Rabhi, Md Yasin Kabir and team leader Gabriel Moreira.
The annual meeting of the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, SIGIR, draws experts from companies that span Alibaba to Walmart Labs. Its 2021 challenge provided 37 million data points from online shopping sessions and asked participants to predict which products users would buy.
Overlap with the ACM contest forced the NVIDIA team to split into two groups that coordinated their efforts between the contests. Ratcheting up the pressure, some team members were heads down writing a paper for the ACM RecSys conference.
The Art of the Fast Break
Two factors propelled a five-person NVIDIA team with members spread across Brazil, Canada, France and the U.S. to the best overall performance, taking first or second place in every leaderboard. They made a big bet on Transformer models developed for natural-language processing and increasingly adopted for recsys, and they understood the art of the handoff.
“As one member is going to bed another picks up the work in a different time zone,” said Even Oldridge, who leads the Merlin group.
“When it all clicks, it’s very effective, and I’m amazed at what we’ve accomplished in the last year building our internal knowledge and our standing in the recsys community to the point where we could win three major competitions in five months,” he said.
Respecting User Privacy
The contest required models to make predictions with no background on users beyond their current browsing session.
“That’s an important task because sometimes users want to browse anonymously, and some privacy laws limit access to historical information,” said Gabriel Moreira, a senior Merlin researcher in São Paulo who led NVIDIA’s SIGIR team.
The competition marked the first time the team used only Transformer models in their solution to a challenge. Moreira’s team aims to make the massive neural networks more easily available to every Merlin customer.
From a Hat Trick to a Haul
On June 30, we notched a fourth consecutive win in RecSys, what hockey players call a haul. MLPerf, an industry benchmarking group, announced that NVIDIA and its partners set records in all its latest training benchmarks, including one in recommendation systems.
The team behind that effort described its work training a recommendation system in less than a minute on 14 NVIDIA DGX systems, a 3.3x speedup compared to their submission a year ago.
Sharing Lessons Learned
The competitions fuel ideas for new techniques that find their way into recsys frameworks like Merlin and related tools, papers and online classes held by the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute. The ultimate goal: Help everyone succeed.
In interviews NVIDIA’s recsys experts freely shared their know-how — part art, part science.
A Pro Tip on RecSys
One best practice is using a diversity of models that work together as an ensemble.
In the ACM RecSys Challenge, the team used both tree and neural-network models. The outputs from one stage became inputs for the next in a process called stacking.
“A single model can make a mistake due to a data error or convergence issue, but if you take an ensemble of several models, it’s very powerful,” said Bo Liu, the newest member of NVIDIA’s Kaggle grandmaster team.
Meet RecSys Experts Online
On July 29, you can meet RecSys experts from Facebook, NVIDIA and TensorFlow to learn more about how to create great recommender systems.
Top game artists, producers, developers and designers are coming together this week for the annual Game Developers Conference. As they exchange ideas, educate and inspire each other, the NVIDIA Studio ecosystem of RTX-accelerated apps, hardware and drivers is helping advance their craft.
GDC 2021 marks a major leap in game development with NVIDIA RTX technology integrated in the latest releases of Unity, Unreal Engine 4, Toolbag and more. They’re supported by the July NVIDIA Studio Driver, available today, providing peak performance and reliability.
Developers can create better looking games, in less time, without worrying about their systems crashing, with NVIDIA Studio.
Game Development Runs Faster with NVIDIA Studio
The two most popular PC game engines, Unity and Unreal Engine, recently received additional RTX benefits.
The new 2021.2 beta release of Unity delivered native support for NVIDIA DLSS, allowing game developers to easily incorporate advanced AI rendering into their games. DLSS produces image quality that’s comparable to native resolution — and sometimes even better — while only conventionally rendering a fraction of the pixels, boosting real-time performance for more engaging experiences and saving artists valuable exporting time.
DLSS SDK 2.2.1, the latest offered by NVIDIA and built into Unity 2021.2, brings a new blueprint function to enable the optimal image quality for a particular resolution, called “Auto” mode. There’s also an optional sharpening slider so developers can further tune their visuals.
Unreal Engine 4.27, currently in preview, included an experimental feature called Eye-Tracked Foveated Rendering. The technique renders a single image at varying resolutions, sharpening the point of focus, while blurring other parts, to mimic human eyesight.
It’s perfect for extended reality with improved performance on NVIDIA RTX GPUs, using NVIDIA Variable Rate Shading, and no discernable loss of picture quality. In addition, GPU Lightmass baking built on RTX ray tracing introduced parameters to better control lighting and levels of detail in production assets.
Image courtesy of Unreal Engine.
Marmoset Toolbag 4.03 sports a new ray-tracing engine, optimized to run on all modern GPUs. Even faster ray-traced results are achieved with native hardware support of NVIDIA RTX devices.
The most recent update added RTX-accelerated AI denoising, allowing game artists to quickly visualize materials with photorealistic lighting and shadows.
Image courtesy of Marmoset Toolbag.
RTX-accelerated ray racing with improved shading, global illumination and reflections raise the visual quality bar, while RTX-accelerated baking speeds up asset creation.
NVIDIA Omniverse is a platform for 3D content creation and collaboration. It was built from the ground up to be easily extensible and customizable with a modular development framework. The platform includes ready-made Omniverse Apps like Machinima and Audio2Face, plus a collection of over 200 Omniverse Kit Extensions, small pieces of code purpose-built to achieve a specific task.
Game developers can use the prebuilt apps or extensions, or easily build their own tools on Omniverse Kit, a robust system allowing coders with basic programming knowledge to build extensions, apps and microservices to assist in content creation pipelines.
Image courtesy of NVIDIA Omniverse.
Developers can learn more about Omniverse in the GDC session Collaborative Game Development with NVIDIA Omniverse, taking place from 8:30-9:30 a.m. PT on July 22. The session will feature tips on collaborative workflows between leading industry applications such as Unreal Engine 4, 3ds Max, and Maya, plus an introduction on how to build on Omniverse Kit. Interested developers can register here.
The Studio Advantage, Built for the Bold
NVIDIA Studio ushered in a new era of creative performance with laptops and desktops purpose-built to power the world’s most innovative minds. Packed with industry-leading RTX GPUs, these machines deliver unprecedented levels of computing power.
Future game developers and content creators can unleash their creativity and build magnificent worlds with the latest RTX 30-Series GPU-powered NVIDIA Studio laptops.
Perfect for students heading back to school, Studio laptops accelerate more than just the latest game engines, they power dozens of applications in STEM — including engineering, computer science, data science and economics applications — plus the apps creators rely on. The latest selection of Studio laptops can be found in the Studio Shop.
Together with game engine and creative app developers, teams of testers and engineers are continually optimizing the way NVIDIA hardware works with top software — enhancing features, reducing the repetitive and speeding up workflows. Studio Drivers undergo extensive testing to deliver the performance and reliability developers need, helping them create the blockbuster games at the speed of imagination.
Further Boost Creativity With the July Studio Driver
The July NVIDIA Studio Driver available today features support for updates to Unity, Unreal Engine, Toolbag, Omniverse and more.
Enscape 3.1, dropping July 21, adds a new NVIDIA real-time denoiser and support for NVIDIA DLSS, designed for real-time engines utilizing NVIDIA RTX GPUs.
Image courtesy of Enscape.
This enables smoother viewport visibility, as well as the ability to render at lower resolutions, enabling higher framerates, using AI super resolution to upscale the image to equal if not higher visual fidelity.
Pixar Animation Studios RenderMan 24 added RenderMan XPU, a look-development focused GPU-accelerated ray tracer.
Image courtesy of RenderMan 24.
Together with AI denoising in the viewport, RenderMan XPU enables artists to interactively create their art and view an image that is predictive of the final frame render.
Click here to download the Maya teapot asset used in performance testing.
Topaz Video Enhance AI now offers Slow Motion, a new RTX GPU Tensor Core powered AI feature that generates a high-quality, smooth, slow-motion capture with minimal artifacts.
Crucially, eliminating the need for an expensive high-frame-rate camera.
Finally, gamers and content creators who use Discord to collaborate and share content with friends can use the new NVDEC integration, exclusive to NVIDIA GPUs, for accelerated video decoding. This lets them share screens and stream over Discord with reduced resources for video and results in better gaming performance.
A pair of new demos running GeForce RTX technologies on the Arm platform unveiled by NVIDIA today show how advanced graphics can be extended to a broader, more power-efficient set of devices.
The two demos, shown at this week’s Game Developers Conference, included Wolfenstein: Youngblood from Bethesda Softworks and MachineGames, as well as The Bistro from the Open Research Content Archive running in real time on a MediaTek Arm platform with ray-traced graphics.
RTX has redefined the industry. We’re now investing in new platforms where we can deploy advanced graphics so gamers have more choice. The performance and energy efficiency of ARM CPUs with NVIDIA technologies can open an entirely new class of PCs.
“RTX is the most groundbreaking technology to come to PC gaming in the last two decades,” said PC Tseng, general manager of MediaTek’s Intelligent Multimedia Business Unit.“MediaTek and NVIDIA are laying the foundation for a new category of Arm-based high-performance PCs.”
RTX on Arm in Action
Showing the potential for NVIDIA RTX on Arm, developer Machine Games packed the Wolfenstein: Youngblood demo with beautiful, ray-traced reflections, all accelerated by NVIDIA DLSS, which uses GPU-accelerated deep-learning algorithms to boost frame rates.
NVIDIA also showed how RTX can enhance the The Bistro demo, which portrays a detailed, ray-traced urban scene in France, while running on an Arm-based system.
Both were demonstrated on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU paired with a MediaTek Kompanio 1200 Arm processor. Wolfenstein: Youngblood uses the idTech game engine made by id Software, while The Bistro uses NVIDIA’s sample framework.
View the demos here.
The demos are made possible by NVIDIA extending support for its software development kits for implementing five key NVIDIA RTX technologies to Arm and Linux.
They include:
Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), which uses AI to boost frame rates and generate beautiful, sharp images for games
RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI), which lets developers add dynamic lighting to their gaming environments
RTX Global Illumination (RTXGI), which helps recreate the way light bounces around in real-world environments
NVIDIA Real-Time Denoisers (NRD) a denoising library that’s designed to work with low ray per pixel signals
RTX Memory Utility (RTXMU), which optimizes the way applications use graphics memory
The Potential for RTX on ARM
GeForce RTX technologies — including GPU-accelerated ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS and other AI-powered innovations — have made a significant impact on real-time graphics since their introduction in 2018.
The world’s leading publishers have used NVIDIA RTX technologies to set apart their top franchises. RTX technologies are now available in an all-star list of gaming franchises, including Battlefield, Call of Duty, Cyberpunk,DEATH STRANDING, Doom, Final Fantasy, Fortnite, LEGO, Minecraft, Quake, Rainbow Six, Red Dead Redemption, Rust, Tomb Raider, Watch Dogs and Wolfenstein.
The news garnered widespread industry support.
“NVIDIA extending RTX support to Arm and Linux has the potential to benefit games and industries such as automotive, where leading manufacturers use Unreal Engine not only for design visualization but also for digital cockpits and infotainment” said Nick Penwarden, vice president of engineering, Epic Games. “We always welcome powerful features and SDKs that can be leveraged across many platforms.”
“Wolfenstein: Youngblood is the first RTX PC game to be shown on an Arm-based system, a testament to the flexibility, power and optimized nature of the iD Tech engine,” said Machinegames CTO Jim Kjellin. “An iD Tech-based game running on an Arm CPU with ray tracing enabled is a significant step in a journey that will result in many more gaming platforms being available to all game developers.”
“RTX support for Arm and Linux opens up new opportunities for game developers to provide more immersive experiences on a wider variety of platforms,” said Mathieu Muller, senior technical product manager of high-end graphics at Unity. “With GeForce RTX’s cutting-edge graphics features, Unity developers targeting Arm platforms will have more tools in their toolbox to create with.”
The RTXDI, NRD and RTXMU SDKs for Arm with Linux and Chromium are available now. RTXGI and DLSS will be coming soon. For more information, contact NVIDIA’s developer relations team or visit developer.nvidia.com.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was today conferred the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award by Asian American Engineer of the Year, an annual event that recognizes outstanding Asian American scientists, engineers and role models.
In a virtual ceremony, Huang was awarded for his contributions as “a visionary and innovator in parallel computing technology that accelerates the realization of AI computing.” He also spoke of his experience as an immigrant and an Asian American.
“It is strange to accept a lifetime achievement award because I feel like I’m just getting started – and NVIDIA indeed is,” Huang said. “Still, I’m grateful and deeply honored to receive this award, which I share with my colleagues at NVIDIA.”
Past recipients of the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award include Nobel laureates, astronauts and key corporate executives like TSMC founder Morris Chang. The event was hosted by the nonprofit Chinese Institute of Engineers/USA, part of the DiscoverE Diversity Council.
“I was fortunate to have had a front-row seat at the creation of the computer industry,” Huang said, reflecting on the early days of NVIDIA and the birth of GPU-accelerated computing. “We dreamed of solving grand computing challenges and even imagined that we would be a major computing company one day.”
Since the company’s first chip, Huang explained, scene complexity in computer graphics has increased around 500 million times. Beyond the field of graphics, GPU acceleration has been channeled into high performance computing and AI to address previously impossible problems in areas such as molecular biology.
“After nearly three decades, it is gratifying to see this computing approach demonstrate astonishing results, embraced by software developers and computer makers worldwide, become an essential instrument of scientists and the engine of modern AI,” Huang said. “There has never been a more exciting time to be an engineer.”
Huang also took the opportunity to share his thoughts as a first-generation immigrant amid a recent rash of violent attacks on Asian Americans in the wake of the pandemic.
“Like other immigrants, Asian Americans make up the fabric of America, have benefited from but also contributed significantly to building this great country,” he said. “Though America is not perfect, it’s hard as a first-generation immigrant not to feel a deep sense of gratitude for the opportunities she offered. I only hope America offers future generations the same opportunities she afforded me.”
Every teacher has a story about the moment a light switched on for one of their students.
David Tseng recalls a high school senior in Taipei excited at a summer camp to see a robot respond instantly when she updated her software. After class, she had a lot of questions and later built an AI-powered security system that let her friends — but not her parents — into her room.
“Before the class, she said she was not very interested in college, but now she’s majoring in computer science and she’s in my class as a freshman,” said Tseng, an assistant professor at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology and founder of CAVEDU, a company that runs youth programs using robotics.
Echoes Out of Africa
A teacher in Tunisia who’s run many robotics events for young people tells a similar story.
“A couple of my students started their own robotics startup, AviaGeek Consulting, and a couple others got internships at an aircraft manufacturer in Tunisia thanks to what they learned and practiced,” said Khlaifia Bilel, an assistant professor of data science at an aviation school near Tunis, who started a student program to build tiny satellites using Jetson products.
“Thanks, NVIDIA, for changing the life of my kids,” he said in a talk at GTC in April.
Planting Seeds on the Farm
Tony Foster, a 4H program volunteer in Kansas, put one of the first Jetson Nano 2GB developer kits into the hands of an 11-year-old.
“She was in a rural area with no programming classes in her junior high school, so we sent her everything she needed and now she’s building a robot that can run a maze and she wants to take it to science fairs and robotics competitions,” he said in a GTC talk (watch a replay free with registration).
Foster, a 4H member since he was seven years old, believes the middle-school years are the best time to plant seeds. “These hands-on opportunities help children grow and learn — and they have results that last a lifetime,” he said.
So far this year, 250 organizations around the globe have expressed interest in using NVIDIA’s educational tools in their curriculum. As part of a grant program, the company has given hundreds of Jetson Nano developer kits to educators in colleges, schools and nonprofit groups.
Our work with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Western Pennsylvania’s AI Pathways Institute also helps expand access to AI and robotics education to more students, particularly in traditionally underrepresented communities.
Released in October, the Jetson Nano 2GB Developer Kit packs quite a punch for its size — a whopping 472 gigaflops of AI performance. That’s enough to run Linux and CUDA software as well as AI training and inference jobs.
Students Get Certified in AI
The hardware is just the half of it. NVIDIA also certifies students and educators in AI skills through its Deep Learning Institute (DLI). Eight-hour classes require attendees to demonstrate their skills by building a working project, and they help them do it through online courses, videos and a repository of code to get started.
The curriculum is being embraced around the world from high schools in Korea to universities in Japan and Europe. For example, at Spain’s University of Málaga, more than a dozen students attended a three-day workshop, seven are now certified AI specialists and the university is looking to integrate Jetson into its curriculum.
In Taiwan last year when the pandemic was not a factor, Tseng ran nearly 20 events with 300 participants and a competition that drew seven teams of high schoolers — work that led to 200 people earning DLI certificates.
Teacher Gives Program an A+
A recent weekend event for educators drew more than 100 attendees including 30 college professors, some from fashion, hospitality and economics departments.
David Tseng of CAVEDU in Taiwan
“Schools are encouraging teachers to merge AI into their courses, so they are eager to find suitable content and DLI is very suitable because the documentation is good and it helps them get going right away,” said Tseng, whose company published a book in traditional Chinese to add to the curriculum.
The weekend event drew kudos from one of the professors who attended.
“Thanks to leaders like NVIDIA providing so many wonderful platforms and tools, I am more confident to teach AI in my next semester courses,” said Cheng-Ling Ying, a professor at Jinwen University of Science and Technology.
Making a Difference in Young Lives
Each teacher, each event sends out ripples that affect many young lives.
Back in Kansas, Foster said 4H STEM programs like the ones he runs now “really helped me on my path to become a computer system engineer working at Dell.”
Today, he’s one of 6,000 volunteers in a university extension program that serves 75,000 youth across five counties. “We want to empower youth … to make decisions about their future and go where they want in jobs and careers,” he said.
To learn more about how NVIDIA promotes youth and vocational education go to Jetson for AI Education.
This GFN Thursday marks a new millennium for GeForce NOW.
By adding 13 games this week, our cloud game-streaming service now offers members instant access to 1,000 PC games.
That’s 1,000 games that members can stream instantly to underpowered PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, SHIELD TVs, Android devices, iPhones and iPads. Devices that otherwise wouldn’t dream of playing the latest PC hits now have access to 1,000 fully optimized games, streamed with GeForce performance.
The milestone marks an increase of more than 500 games since the service left beta less than 18 months ago.
And the best part? We’re just getting warmed up.
Playing with the Best
All these games and more are part of the GeForce NOW library. What will you play today?
A grand milestone like this wouldn’t have been possible without the developers and publishers who opted in to stream their games on our open cloud-gaming service.
Publishers like Riot Games, Bungie, Paradox Interactive, Epic Games and more know that bringing their games to the cloud can be easy, and enables more gamers to play their titles. And partners like Square Enix have used GeForce NOW to make sure anyone and everyone can experience their new games, like Outriders, both as a demo and at launch.
These tremendous partners understand the value of making sure that members can play the PC games they already own across their devices. There are more than 300 of these partners who have shown how much they believe in our cloud gaming philosophy, with more joining every GFN Thursday.
Endless Choice
There’s a bit of everything ready and waiting to be played on the cloud — including DLC and expansions, like X3: Albion Prelude, new this week.
With 1,000 games in the GeForce NOW library, including nearly 100 free-to-play games that all members have access to, there’s a title for every type of PC gamer.
Want to become a hero in a strange new land? RPGs like The Witcher 3: Game of the Year Edition put you in the middle of fantasy epics, while exploration games like ASTRONEER challenge you to survive on a strange, brightly colored planet.
Looking for a little history lesson? Travel back to ancient Greece in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, or rule over the Middle Ages in Crusader Kings III.
Members can meet up with their friends, playing cooperatively in games like Destiny 2, Valheim and OUTRIDERS, or competitively in Rocket League and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Or they can enjoy a stunning story in acclaimed titles like Death Stranding, Life is Strange 2, Alan Wake and more.
Want to experience real-time ray tracing for yourself? Priority and Founders members play Control, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Cyberpunk 2077 and more with RTX ON.
There’s a game for every mood. Feeling spooky? Try to survive in Dead by Daylight or Outlast. Feeling spooky and don’t want to be alone? Group up in Phasmophobia and shout at some ghosts. Maybe you’re only afraid of zombies? See how long you can survive in games like 7 Days to Die and Dying Light.
Feel like a collectable card game? Try out Legends of Runeterra or Magic The Gathering: Arena. Feel like a strategy game? How about a sci-fi 4X sim like Endless Space 2, or a historical take on tactics like Hearts of Iron II Complete? Every genre is playable instantly on GeForce NOW.
Looking for a Castaway moment, out in the middle of the ocean with only a shark and some distant dry land to keep you company? Check out Raft.
“Hang on, GeForce NOW,” you might say. “I want to actually play as the shark. Like, literally be a shark. Can you make that happen?” We’ve got that, too: Maneater is for you.
There’s always a new game to discover with a library this big, streaming instantly. And every GFN Thursday brings even more gaming goodness.
All of This and More
Explore a world full of adventure in Alchemist Adventure, an action RPG releasing this week that challenges you to recall the lost memories of your past.
Over a dozen games released this GFN Thursday, bringing GeForce NOW to the grand milestone. This week’s new additions to the cloud library are:
The Immortal Mayor (day-and-date release on Steam, July 15)
Lost at Sea (day-and-date release on Steam, July 15)
There’s a whole lot of games to play on GeForce NOW. What are you grinding this weekend? And what are some of your favorites among the 1,000-game library? Let us know on Twitter or in the comments below.
