Chinese internet giant Baidu is looking to gain ground in artificial intelligence (AI) field with the launch of a new no-code development platform called EZDL. It will allow users to develop custom machine learning models without coding skills.
EZDL is aimed to help small and medium enterprises which find it difficult to create their own AI models. The company said that its new platform is easy to use, provides high performance, and is highly secure.
It will allow even the entry-level AI developers to build models based on image classification, object classification, and sound classification.
“EZDL is a service platform that allows users to build custom machine learning models with a drag-and-drop interface. It takes only four steps to train a deep learning model, built specifically for your unique business needs,” said Yongkang Xie, Tech Lead of Baidu EZDL.
“Even if you have had no exposure to programming, you can quickly build models on this platform with zero barriers. EZDL can help companies with limited AI experts and computing resources to quickly and efficiently complete deep learning training and deployment with only a small amount of data.”
The AI models built using EZDL can be used to classify the images, to detect the objects in an image, and classify the source of sound in an audio. Enterprises can easily train the models for an image classification task by assigning 20 to 100 images for the defined label. The training will take only 10 to 30 minutes.
For sound classification, it requires 50+ audio files. Once trained, it can recognize whether the sound in the audio is of a human, dog, cat, etc. The training of sound classification models can take around an hour.
After training the model, the enterprises can easily download the algorithm as a software development kit. It can also be uploaded into a public or private cloud platform. Baidu said that the algorithms will support Android, iOS and other operating systems.
“As one of global leaders in AI, Baidu embodies its mission of making a complex world simpler through technology. Baidu has continued to lead and promote the development and applications of AI,” said Youping Yu, General Manager of AI Ecosystem Division at Baidu.
“Through our Global Business Unit, we are devoted to sharing Baidu’s core technologies, capabilities, and resources with the global community. We seek to create a true ecosystem for AI, democratizing access to AI capabilities. Baidu officially released Baidu Brain 1.0 in September 2016, and just two years later, in July 2018, we released Baidu Brain 3.0 — encompassing a full AI “tech stack” from chips to deep learning frameworks to platforms.”
Baidu mentioned several use cases of EZDL. Idcool home decorating website is using it to automatically identify design styles and room types. A research institution is using it for identify Chinese herbal medicine, kinds of wild birds and frogs. A retail company is using it to detect if the items on supermarket shelves are shown as per the needs of brand identity.
It can also help in security monitoring by differentiating between normal and abnormal sounds.
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“Through our open AI platform, Baidu provides developers with a number of leading AI capabilities such as speech, vision, NLP, and AR/VR. Baidu’s open AI platform is currently the most comprehensive, open, and dynamic in China. To date, more than 600,000 developers are using the Baidu open AI platform and Baidu’s AI capabilities have been applied in more than 20 industries,” added Youping Yu.
“Technology has no borders. We’ve seen in China how EZDL has lowered the barrier for small and medium businesses to use AI to solve their business problems. We are excited to see innovative use cases from the global community. It is our hope that by opening up the platform and democratizing AI capabilities, we will help developers and businesses around the world achieve greater success.”
