The LF Deep Learning Foundation has accepted Pyro as its latest project. The LF DL Foundation is a Linux Foundation project meant to accelerate the growth of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning open-source projects. Pyro is a probabilistic programming framework created by Uber that is designed to bring together the best of both modern deep learning and Bayesian modeling.
“Today’s announcement of Uber’s contribution of the project brings us closer to our goal of building a comprehensive ecosystem of AI, machine learning and deep learning and projects,” said Ibrahim Haddad, Executive Director of the LF DL. “We look forward to helping to grow the community contributing to and using Pyro to further improve forecasting and other capabilities.”
Uber initially designed Pyro with four principles at its core: It wanted to create a framework that was universal, scalable, minimal, and flexible. Pyro can represent any computable probability distribution, scales to large data sets, is implemented with a small core of composable abstractions and aims for automation and control, the foundation explained. Uber decided to open source the project in 2017 with the hopes that the scientific community would be able to collaborate on making AI tools “more flexible, open, and easy-to-use.”
According to the foundation, Pyro solves challenges related to sensor fusion, time series forecasting, ad campaign optimization, and data augmentation for deep image understanding.
“Pyro was originally created at Uber AI Labs to help make deep probabilistic programming faster and more seamless for AI practitioners in both industry and academia,” said Zoubin Ghahramani, head of Uber AI Labs. “By incorporating Pyro into the LF DL portfolio, we hope to facilitate greater opportunities for researchers worldwide and make deep learning and Bayesian modeling more accessible.”
Pyro is the fifth project to join the LF Deep Learning Foundation, and joins Acumos AI, Angel, EDL and Horovod. In addition, Pyro is already being used by companies like Siemens, IBM, Noodle.AI and universities such as MIT, Harvard and Stanford.
