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Microsoft Open Sources Its Machine Learning Toolkit (thestack.com)

Posted by timothy on from the those-darn-machines dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has this week made its Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit (DMTK) openly available to the developer community. Researchers at the Microsoft Asia lab have released the toolkit on GitHub under an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) license, to encourage the use of multiple computers in parallel to solve complex problems. Its design builds on a parameter server-based programming framework, which allows big data machine learning tasks to be easily scaled, and flexibly and efficiently executed. The toolkit also contains two distributed machine learning algorithms, which can be used to train the world's fastest and largest topic model, as well as the largest word-embedding model.
This is a welcome move, especially after Google did something broadly similar.

15 comments

  1. Good for Microsoft. by deviated_prevert · · Score: 0

    A really good move to restore some faith in the programming community. Machine learning is a field that is much more complicated than desktop programming or user gui software design and will drive the very future of computers. The more programmers that can be stimulated to do research in the field of machine learning the better IMO. Far better than spawning nothing but hyped up "web programmers" which is what Microsoft was all about a few years back with all the .Net/mono crap they push on everyone.

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    1. Re:Good for Microsoft. by victorsosa · · Score: 0

      Just trying catching up with google

    2. Re: Good for Microsoft. by tysonedwards · · Score: 1

      The more programmers that can be *simulated* to do research in the field of machine learning the better IMO.

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      Thirty four characters live here.
    3. Re:Good for Microsoft. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Far better than spawning nothing but hyped up "web programmers" which is what Microsoft was all about a few years back with all the .Net/mono crap they push on everyone.

      If you believe that .NET is just for "web programmers", you really are an idiot. Anyone who's actually done serious work with.NET would immediately recognize your statement as false. Stop bloviating about things you know anything about.

    4. Re:Good for Microsoft. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      True that. But not going to complain.

    5. Re:Good for Microsoft. by Wootery · · Score: 1

      Far better than spawning nothing but hyped up "web programmers" which is what Microsoft was all about a few years back with all the .Net/mono crap they push on everyone.

      I have to agree with the angry AC who commented before me: it's hardly fair to say that .Net is just a web framework. C#/Common Language Infrastructure is pretty great: like another attempt at a JVM, which has worked out really well.

      A non-web example: they used C# as the platform for indi games on the Xbox 360, with the XNA framework (I'm not sure about the Xbox One).

  2. Your turn, Apple! by elwinc · · Score: 0, Troll

    Now that the second and third largest tech companies have open sourced their machine learning algorithms for research use, it's time for the world's most valuable tech company to do the same. OK, Apple, show us your stuff!

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    1. Re:Your turn, Apple! by Threni · · Score: 1

      Difference is, Apple found a way of making money out of their tech. Everyone's dumping Microsoft stuff, hence the panic to open source the compilers etc.

    2. Re:Your turn, Apple! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think you might need to wait a few months while they "incorporate" one of the existing opensource libraries into their own then release "apple's" toolkit.

  3. Re:Doesn't work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    People have wanted to talk to their computers and get the computers to do stuff for them for decades. Now that computers actually can listen and do stuff for you, people realize that to be useful, they have to be listening ALL THE TIME. Apparently this is not what people want anymore, so machine learning isn't as useful anymore.

  4. Aerosolve by kervin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    AirBnB also released Aerosolve on Github.

  5. Re:Doesn't work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That isn't 100% true. A small embedded chip that uses a Matched Filter/ANN to activate/deactivate a microphone would prevent the need to have "always on" microphone functionality beaming a continuous audio stream to the cloud.

  6. Github link to source by scum-e-bag · · Score: 2

    https://github.com/Microsoft/D...

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  7. Does it matter what MIT stands for? by Stewie241 · · Score: 1

    I know we chastise the editors a lot for not specifying the meaning of an abbreviation, but I feel like in this case it is actually not helpful at all - it doesn't much matter what MIT stands for - it matters more what the MIT license is.