Baidu Inc, major player in China’s internet marketing is launching a platform which will help businesses in developing and integrating artificial intelligence, AI, models without any coding background. They are trying to play a major part in the on-going hot artificial intelligence contest.
According to the announcement made on Saturday, EZDL is a “no-code platform to build custom machine learning models,” and is particularly modelled by keeping in mind easy usage and security concerns, claims the company.
“EZDL is a service platform that allows users to build custom machine learning models with a drag-and-drop interface,” YongKang Xie, head of developing team of Baidu EZDL, said. “It takes only four steps to train a deep learning model, built specifically for your unique business needs.”
Image classification, object detection and sound classification are the three important applications of machine learning that are the main focus of EZDL, many present softwares have also already addressed these areas. The goal of this platform is to target small and medium-sized enterprises which don’t have the ability to develop AI models on their own.
EZDL needs very less data for training an AI model is one of the important claims of Baidu. In training object detection and image classification models, it needs only 20 to 100 images for every label, and in the case of sound classification, it requires maximum of 50 audio files. Some simple models can even be trained in 15 minutes and complex ones can take up to 1 hour of training. Baidu also said that two-thirds of the developed models have reached accuracy of more than 90 percent.
Once the training process has been completed and model is ready, the algorithm can be uploaded on a private or public cloud platform or can be downloaded in the form of software development kit. The developed algorithm will support iOS, Android and other operating systems, Baidu informed.
Baidu showed possible applications of each category of model. For image recognition, it gave reference of home decorating website Idcool, which employed EZDL to develop an automatic algorithm to recognize design style and type of room from the given pictures of the home interior. Another cited example was of a user who created an algorithm to recognize faulty goods in manufacturing departments. One user trained an AI model to keep in check cracks of roads and pavements.
For object detection, an AI model was created which was capable of detecting whether the items on the shelf of a superstore are arranged as the owner desires. Lastly, the use of sound recognition model was shown in identifying “abnormal sounds” in and around the building, for better security.
Holger Mueller, an analyst, informed about the possible dangers of using free platforms such as EZDL. “Consumers are always well-advised to understand that when a product is free, they are the product, or respectively their data exhaust is,” were his words.
Previously, Baidu has launched AI services such as Brain platform, DuerOS digital assistant and AI hardware service such as a Kunlun chip.
