Lenovo expands partner ecosystem and launches ready-to-deploy AI solutions

Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) announces the expansion of its partner ecosystem and launches five new ready-to-deploy artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions.

This growing global ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs) enables Lenovo to bring to market AI solutions for a wide range of applications and industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and financial services.

Lenovo also deepens engagements with industry leaders Intel and NVIDIA to help support its extensive portfolio of AI-ready servers and storage, enabling ISVs to optimize their AI applications across the entire hardware and software stack, ensuring customers receive the stellar performance for their AI investments.

Lenovo’s continued mission to make AI solutions easy to consume by global customers is enabled through its ability to partner with leading developers and data scientists.

Leveraging Lenovo’s AI innovation centers, AI architecture and hardware expertise, Lenovo is helping move AI from concept to reality.

Lenovo collaborates with Addfor

When the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, normal life in Italy was severely disrupted. Addfor, headquartered in Turin, Italy, set out to use its AI expertise to help governments and local authorities keep citizens as safe as possible.

For the City of Turin, Addfor developed and deployed an AI solution crowdHEDGE, based on Lenovo ThinkSystem SE350 edge servers to interface with networked video systems, using AI drone footage to extract data insights in outdoor spaces like city parks.

crowdHEDGE focuses on tracking foot traffic and crowd sizes to closely monitor compliance with COVID-19 public policies. Lenovo’s ThinkSystem edge server solution, powered by NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs, powers the image recognition captured by the drone footage.

“Thanks to this pilot project in the field of safety and security of public spaces, the City of Turin addresses the combined use of drones, AI, and edge computing to focus on urban and aerospace mobility as an opportunity for the use of AI within the Public Administration,” said Deputy Mayor Innovation and Smart City, City of Turin.

Addfor is one of several ISV partners Lenovo is working with as part of an AI Accelerator program to enable, build and optimize AI solutions designed to solve real-world problems.

“We are already exploring ways that the solution can be adapted to help prevent overcrowding in business and public settings, to help better protect citizens,” said Enrico Busto, Founding Partner & CTO at Addfor.

“We’re excited to continue developing cutting-edge AI and edge computing solutions supported by Lenovo and NVIDIA. We’re confident that our partnership will play an important role in pushing the frontiers of data science innovation.”

Lenovo accelerates ready-to-deploy AI solutions for AI developers

As part its newest AI Solutions Accelerator Program, Lenovo elevates partnerships with ISVs to create ready-to-deploy AI solutions to help enterprise and SMB customers improve efficiency and customer satisfaction.

These solutions build on Lenovo’s commitment to accelerate AI adoption for enterprise and SMB customers by diminishing barriers to deployment through practical offerings.

Retail visual AI solutions with Everseen

• Computer Vision + AI for loss prevention and beyond.
• Identifies scan errors in real-time using computer vision technology.
• Improves profitability with AI capabilities, enabling cost savings and store transformation.
• Improves the customer experience and customer throughput.

Scalable MLOps solution with cnvrg.io

• The cnvrg.io platform, running on Lenovo AI-Ready Servers fueled by Intel Xeon Scalable Processors with built-in AI acceleration, provides data scientists with a unified environment optimized for Intel Deep Learning Boost to build, deploy and manage machine learning workloads on top of the Lenovo AI purpose-built solutions and products. This simplifies and streamlines all phases of end-to-end machine learning pipeline development.
• Data scientists can easily manage, experiment, track, version and deploy models in a single unified platform with one click.
• Designed to be agnostic and portable, it solves key MLOps challenges to help data scientists deliver more models to production quickly.

Edge analytics solution with SAS

• With SAS Event Stream Processing running on Lenovo Edge AI platforms, customers can analyze streaming data, uncover hidden insights with AI and make real-time, intelligent decisions.
• Customers can choose from a broad line-up of Lenovo AI-Ready infrastructure including the ThinkSystem SE350 powered by the latest generation Intel Xeon D processor, the ThinkEdge SE30 or SE50 running the latest Intel Core processors or the ThinkSystem SR650 V2 powered by the 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, for flexible deployment options that best meets the customers edge environment.
• Customers can overcome data decay and lost value by deriving real-time insight from streaming IoT sensor data or video data streams.
• Deploy models to the edge with ease, using a low-code visual dashboard or popular open-source programming languages and frameworks.
• Setup streaming event phases at the far edge, fog, cloud, or data center for a hybrid architecture suited to fit specific requirements.

Edge-to-Core data management with NetApp AI

• Enables AI workloads at the edge or core with intuitive data management tools built in.
• Storage reference architectures including compute, storage, and networking for quick start deployment.
• Provides affordable AI training or inferencing solutions suited for organizations of all sizes, allowing customers to start with a small cluster and add infrastructure as their workload demands increase.
• Deploy and manage AI training workloads by adding Lenovo LiCO AI Platform software.

“We have had the opportunity to work with organizations and independent software vendors around the world to implement AI solutions to help address the world’s most challenging problems,” said Scott Tease, Vice President and General Manager of HPC and AI, Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group.

“We are committed to continuing this momentum to accelerate AI adoption and streamline deployment across multiple industries and applications.”

Lenovo and Intel support ai university research

Through Lenovo’s global AI Innovation Centers, Lenovo and Intel are working with universities around the world to help students in their research efforts, unlocking their potential through access to Intel’s innovative and flexible x86 hardware ecosystem.

The research and learnings discovered in these public labs around the world continue to help build optimized AI solutions that can be easily adopted and deployed by a variety of businesses.

Lenovo and Intel recently worked with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Reese Innovation Lab’s, student fellows and staff at their lab to design and engineer a new Health Greeter Kiosk solution to encourage the use of masks and social distancing through AI technology detection (without the use of facial recognition).

The kiosks provide real-time feedback to patrons to support proper mask and social distancing guidelines.

Three of these AI health kiosks are currently deployed at UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus as they work to bring both students and employees back together in person.

Lenovo will be bringing the Health Greeter Kiosk software to market for other industries beginning this May.