Artificial intelligence (AI) tech giant Nvidia today announced the opening of its research center in Israel. Former Google Brain senior executive Prof. Gal Chechik will manage the center. Chechik will be responsible for establishing a research division that will be in the forefront of technology, and will recruit a research staff of AI experts. The company will recruit 10 employees in the first stage.
Chechik was a scientist at Google for the past 12 years in Silicon Valley, and is also a staff member at the interdisciplinary center for brain research at Bar Ilan University.
Nvidia is also planning to expand its deep learning engineering staff in Israel by recruiting 20 more employees for the development center in Tel Aviv.
Chechik said, "Nvidia is a leading global AI player, and I am delighted to be assembling a research team in Israel that will take part in these groundbreaking efforts. AI is an extremely potent technological force in the time in which we are living. Israel has extraordinary human capital that is making it a key player for a global company like Nvidia."
Nvidia revealed its new research center at today's GTC Conference in Tel Aviv, attended by 2,800 developers, high tech personnel, investors, and entrepreneurs. Nvidia said that it was the world's largest event in AI, deep learning, and graphic processors.
The keynote speaker at the conference was Nvidia chief scientist William Dally, who leads Nvidia's global research division of over 200 researchers. In his speech, Dally said, "Despite being a small country, Israel is a giant power in the AI industry. I am amazed every time at the quality of research, the researchers, and the hunger for new ideas in the market. In this spirit, I am glad to announce today the opening of Nvidia's new AI research division in Israel, led by esteemed scientist Prof. Gal Chechik."
Last August, Nvidia launched its Turing series of processors, including the Qudro RTX8000 and its little brother, the Tesla-T4, whose performance is 36 times the speed of the CPU. Commenting on this, Dally said, "We're in a revolutionary era in computers and their performance capacity, following the end of Moore's Law and 3% annual increase in CPU capacity. Our GPU is the solution that will lead the new era of supercomputers. The deep learning revolution, which is taking place and adding to progress in all facets of life, from autonomous vehicles to media and entertainment to advanced medicine, is possible only because of the amazing development that has occurred in hardware."
At the same time, over the past year, Nvidia has extended its activity and presence in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and among the Israeli community of developers. 150 AI and deep learning startups have been accepted to date in Nvidia's inception program for accompanying companies and providing them with access to Nvidia's people, products and developments in Israel and worldwide.
Nvidia senior EMEA director of business development Nati Amsterdam said, "Nvidia's activity in the Israeli innovation industry has increased significantly over the past year, as shown by the number of Israeli startups taking part in Nvidia's startup accompaniment program, which doubled to 150, and by the expansion of our connections with developers and institutions of higher learning. The innovative develops coming out of Israel, including, among other things, defense, cyber defense, digital health, precise agriculture, data processing, and autonomous vehicles, put Israel on the cutting edge of global technology."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on October 18, 2018
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