NTT Backs a Start-up for Distributed Processing and Machine Learning

NTT announced a research partnership and investment with Preferred Networks (PFN) to co-develop technologies for processing Big Data streams in the network.

PFN is a new venture established in March 2014 as a spin off from Preferred Infrastructure, a developer of natural language processing and machine learning technology. NTT will invest about 200 million yen to acquire under 10% of PFN. The company has offices in Tokyo and San Mateo, California.

The partnership will combine NTT’s distributed processing and leading-edge machine learning technologies and know-how on network security with PFN’s machine learning and deep learning technologies and know-how on development and implementation.

NTT Laboratories and PFI have been working on Jubatus, a Big Data processing platform, since 2011. Jubatus is said to provide better performance in both real-time processing and deep analysis than existing Big Data processing technologies, such as Hadoop. Jubatus has been released as open source software.

NTT said this joint research will be needed to deal with the coming era of Super Big Data, when billions of distributed sensors and edge nodes will create vast amounts of real time data. Advanced machine learning will be needed in the network.

http://www.ntt.co.jp/news2014/1410e/141001a.html
http://www.preferred-networks.jp/