Neurala’s Brain Builder Said to Lower the Bar for Creation of AI Applications

Neurala’s Brain Builder is an end-to-end SaaS platform aimed at streamlining the creation of custom vision AI solutions. By giving organizations an all-in-one tool for data tagging, training, deployment, and analysis, Brain Builder aims to make custom AI creation more efficient and accessible for AI beginners and experts alike.

While investments in AI have increased exponentially in recent years, a staggering 91 percent of organizations still face significant barriers to adoption, including a lack of IT infrastructure and a shortage of AI experts,” said Dr. Massimiliano Versace, CEO and co-founder of Neurala, in a press release. “These challenges are compounded by the fact that every company has their own unique data, use cases, workflows and problems they wish to solve, which demand customized – and resultantly complex – AI solutions.”

“Now organizations can reap the benefits of AI without breaking the bank or requiring a PhD.”

Founded in 2006, Neurala’s research team invented Lifelong-DNN (L-DNN) technology, which reduces the data requirements for AI model development and enables continuous learning in the cloud or at the edge. Now, with customers in the drone, robotics, smart device, industrial inspection and AI professional services verticals, Neurala’s technology has been deployed on 30 million devices globally.

Last year, Neurala launched its Brain Builder data annotation tool, which enables fast and accurate creation of data for DNN training. The new tool builds on data annotation to go deeper into the full AI lifecycle. Users upload images to Brain Builder and use the platform’s annotation tool to tag data; the platform is trained as it tags.

L-DNN allows the AI to learn quickly, at the edge and iteratively over time. This further simplifies custom AI creation, as L-DNN significantly reduces the amount of data and training time required and enables ongoing improvement of AI even after it has been deployed.

Organizations using Brain Builder are seeing cost reductions and savings compared to alternative deep learning approaches.

In an interview with AI Trends, Versace said the Neurala’s biggest customers is a top three smartphone manufacturer. “We have reached a major milestone in deployment,” with its AI to be within the cameras on what is expected to be millions of shipped phone devices, Versace said.

The idea for Brain Builder came from experience with AI deployments among early adopters. “People have misconceptions,” he said. Getting data prepared to be useful to the AI system is a lot of work. “There is a whole industry around the tagging of images. It is a massive undertaking, and many times, the data is proprietary,” Versace said.

Once a company has the data, sometimes the experience of what to do next is “very shallow” and developers get stuck. Then the find the AI system needs to constantly change to respond to the changing environment. “It’s more of a lifecycle product than a one-off” application, he said.

“All these made us build a set of tools we put in the same package, Brain Builder,” he said.

He sees the company’s experience working with early adopters as an edge. “We have a closer relationship with customers. We are building exactly what people are asking us for,” he said, contrasting the interaction with that of customers of Microsoft with Azure, Amazon with AWS/Sagemaker, Google AutoML and IBM Watson, who he cites as competitors.

Other use cases the company anticipated include robotics, for a robot deployed in consumer retail for example, and for inspections, such as of power grids, he said.