AI Meets 5G at the Edge: The Innovation Center at MWC 2020 in Barcelona

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AI is alive at the edge of the network, where it’s already transforming everything from car makers to supermarkets. And we’re just getting started.

NVIDIA’s AI Edge Innovation Center, a first for this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, will put attendees at the intersection of AI, 5G and edge computing. There, they can hear about best practices for AI at the edge and get an update on how NVIDIA GPUs are paving the way to better, smarter 5G services.

It’s a story that’s moving fast.

AI was born in the cloud to process the vast amounts of data needed for jobs like recommending new products and optimizing news feeds. But most enterprises interact with their customers and products in the physical world at the edge of the network — in stores, warehouses and smart cities.

The need to sense, infer and act in real time as conditions change is driving the next wave of AI adoption at the edge. That’s why a growing list of forward-thinking companies are building their own AI capabilities using the NVIDIA EGX edge-computing platform.

Walmart, for example, built a smart supermarket it calls its Intelligent Retail Lab. Jakarta uses AI in a smart city application to manage its vehicle registration program. BMW and Procter & Gamble automate inspection of their products in smart factories. They all use NVIDIA EGX along with our Metropolis application framework for video and data analytics.

For conversational AI, the NVIDIA Jarvis developer kit enables voice assistants geared to run on embedded GPUs in smart cars or other systems. WeChat, the world’s most popular smartphone app, accelerates conversational AI using NVIDIA TensorRT software for inference.

All these software stacks ride on our CUDA-X libraries, tools, and technologies that run on an installed base of more than 500 million NVIDIA GPUs.

Carriers Make the Call

At MWC Los Angeles this year, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang announcedAerial, software that rides on the EGX platform to let telecommunications companies harness the power of GPU acceleration.

With Aerial, carriers can both increase the spectral efficiency of their virtualized 5Gradio-access networks and offer new AI services for smart cities, smart factories, cloud gaming and more — all on the same computing platform.

In Barcelona, NVIDIA and partners including Ericsson will give an update on how Aerial will reshape the mobile edge network.

Verizon is already using NVIDIA GPUs at the edge to deliver real-time ray tracing for AR/VR applications over 5G networks.

It’s one of several ways telecom applications can be taken to the next level with GPU acceleration. Imagine having the ability to process complex AI jobs on the nearest base station with the speed and ease of making a cellular call.

Your Dance Card for Barcelona

For a few days in February, we will turn our innovation center — located at Fira de Barcelona, Hall 4 — into a virtual university on AI with 5G at the edge. Attendees will get a world-class deep dive on this strategic technology mashup and how companies are leveraging it to monetize 5G.

Sessions start Monday morning, Feb. 24, and include AI customer case studies in retail, manufacturing and smart cities. Afternoon talks will explore consumer applications such as cloud gaming, 5G-enabled cloud AR/VR and AI in live sports.

We’ve partnered with the organizers of MWC on applied AI sessions on Tuesday, Feb. 25. These presentations will cover topics like federated learning, an emerging technique for collaborating on the development and training of AI models while protecting data privacy.

Wednesday’s schedule features three roundtables where attendees can meet executives working at the intersection of AI, 5G and edge computing. The week also includes two instructor-led sessions from the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institutethat trains developers on best practices.