Microsoft releases version 2.0 of its deep learning toolkit

#Microsoft today launched version 2.0 of what is now called the #MicrosoftCognitiveToolkit. This #opensource toolkit, which was previously known as CNTK, is Microsoft’s competitor to similar tools like #TensorFlow, #Caffe and #Torch, and, while the first version was able to challenge many of its competitors in terms of speed, this second version puts an emphasis on usability (by adding support for #Python and the popular #Keras neural networking library, for example) and future extensibility, while still maintaining — and improving — its speed. The toolkit originally launched into beta in October 2016 and the team has tested it ever since. Now, the company deems it to be ready for production use. Microsoft technical fellow Xuedong Huang told me that the 1.0 release was very much about open sourcing Microsoft’s internal toolkit and making it available to others. Because it was essentially an internal tool, though, it didn’t support Python for example, even though it’s by far the most popular language among machine learning developers.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/microsoft-releases-version-2-0-of-its-deep-learning-toolkit/