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LENOVO SC17 — Lenovo on Tuesday made a push to get more businesses to adopt artificial intelligence by announcing AI Innovation Centers, two customer partnerships and two new products. The news comes from the Lenovo Data Center Group at its SC17 event this week in Denver.

Lenovo believes AI is critical to a company’s digital transformation. And the vendor is setting its sights on big goals, such as AI’s ability to impact global humanitarian efforts, such as cures for disease or to gain a deeper understanding of climate change. At the same time, Lenovo recognizes the desire to use AI within businesses. According to a report by Infosys, 76 percent of senior decision-makers agree that AI is fundamental to the success of their organization’s strategy. By 2020, 39 percent of survey respondents who are either currently using or plan to use AI anticipate a 39 percent increase, on average, in company revenue.

“Artificial intelligence is already having a profound impact on traditional business strategies and scientific research, and most senior leaders consider it a priority for the year ahead. To truly benefit from the vast amount of data available to organizations today, our customers must embrace AI as the vehicle to help them achieve success in today’s competitive business landscape,” said Kirk Skaugen, president, Lenovo Data Center Group. “With our newly opened, global AI innovation centers and a comprehensive product and service portfolio, we are committed to helping bring their AI deployments to life.”

Building on the vendor’s broader $1.2 billion investment in AI R&D, the Data Center Group is operating three new AI innovation centers (watch video below) in Morrisville, North Carolina; Stuttgart, Germany; and Beijing, China. The company has more than 100 Lenovo data scientists and specialized AI developers working to engineer AI-enabled solutions. Lenovo customers can access the centers remotely to test and refine applications and workloads on systems optimized for high-performance. There’s an additional opportunity to join a community of experts including partners, data scientists and customers, to share insights and work on solving problems together, the company said

Lenovo has partnerships with North Carolina State University (NCSU) and University College London (UCL). Working with NCSU, researchers are using an AI-enabled geospatial image analysis process combined with deep-learning algorithms to recognize farmland, identify crops, monitor soil conditions and calculate water requirements against available water resources to create maps of drought areas. The same AI techniques help local and global farmers …

… examine crop and soil health for efficiently managing water and energy resources in irrigation, improving their profitability, while conserving scarce natural resources.

At University College London (UCL), researchers are reconstructing high-energy particle collisions from the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. This work is addressing some of the most fundamental questions about the origins of the universe; however, the increasing intensity of collisions at the LHC challenges the traditional pattern-recognition techniques, which would require unaffordable amounts of computational resources. Through collaboration with Lenovo, UCL researchers are aiming to apply AI to reconstruct particle trajectories using imaging data from ATLAS much more efficiently than from traditional methods. This approach not only streamlines the computational resources, but can also help UCL advance its research in reconstructing much more complex events, the company said.

Finally, Lenovo announced new GPUs for ThinkSystem SD530 and the Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestrator (LiCO), two offerings designed specifically for future-defined workloads. AI, machine learning and deep-learning workloads demand high-performance, computing-optimized infrastructure.

Lenovo’s target on the data center continues, and for partners that was emphasized with the kickoff of the DCG Partner Program that launched April 1.