South Korean research lab partners with Theta to scale AI experimentation

Sungkyunkwan University's AI & Media Lab (AIM Lab), under the leadership of Professor Sungeun Hong, has integrated Theta EdgeCloud into its computing infrastructure.

Key highlights:

* South Korean research lab partners with Theta to scale AI experimentation

Sungkyunkwan University's AI & Media Lab (AIM Lab), headed by Professor Sungeun Hong, has integrated Theta EdgeCloud into its computing infrastructure, making it the 32nd academic institution to join Theta Labs's decentralized GPU platform.

The lab, a contributor to multimodal learning and 3D vision research, will use the platform for a wide range of tasks, spanning vision-language modeling to domain adaptation and privacy-conscious domain transfer.

Theta EdgeCloud's pay-as-you-go architecture provides scalable GPU power without the overhead typically associated with traditional centralized infrastructure, helping the lab train and deploy AI models with greater speed and lower cost.

* Samsung-supported research earns international acclaim

The collaboration comes at a time when the AIM Lab is gaining broader recognition in the global AI research community.

One of its latest projects, titled "Question-Aware Gaussian Experts for Audio-Visual Question Answering," has been accepted as a Highlight Paper at CVPR 2024. CVPR, known for its highly selective review process with an acceptance rate of just 2.98%, is a premier computer vision conference, while Highlight Papers are further selected by the program chairs from accepted papers. The study introduces QA-TIGER, a model that aligns key audio and visual frames based on user queries to improve accuracy in video-based question answering.

Another recent achievement is the publication of a second paper, "Memory-Efficient Cross-Modal Attention for RGB-X Segmentation and Crowd Counting," in the journal Pattern Recognition. This work proposes a lightweight attention mechanism that reduces memory requirements for multimodal image segmentation, offering potential applications in fields like robotics and smart infrastructure. Both projects were supported by Samsung, which has a long-standing research affiliation with Sungkyunkwan University.

* Growing network of academic adopters

By joining Theta's ecosystem, Sungkyunkwan University now collaborates with top-tier institutions such as Stanford, Seoul National University, KAIST, and NTU Singapore. This expanding academic network is united by the goal of improving AI system performance and scalability through decentralized computing.

Professor Hong expressed the lab's intent to leverage Theta's capabilities across multiple research areas, including 3D vision and robotic perception.

"Theta EdgeCloud is now the clear leader in decentralized GPU infrastructure for research institutions worldwide. We're excited to get the computing flexibility and scale we need to push the boundaries of multimodal AI. From 3D vision to robot perception, Theta enables us to train and evaluate models more rapidly and cost-effectively. This will be game changing for our research lab."

Mitch Liu, CEO and co-founder of Theta Labs, welcomed the university by noting the significance of its link to Samsung.

"We're super proud to welcome Sungkyunkwan University, with its strong research alliance with Samsung, to the Theta family. As more Samsung-supported and globally respected research institutions join us, Theta EdgeCloud continues to set the standard for scalable, decentralized AI infrastructure. There is no doubt that Theta is becoming a household name in academia and research, and our reputation is now spreading by word of mouth and referrals."

The partnership between Theta EdgeCloud and Sungkyunkwan University's AI & Media Lab marks another milestone in the open-source initiative's journey to democratize AI research infrastructure, providing researchers with the tools and support they need to push the boundaries of technological innovation. With backing from Samsung and a growing portfolio of influential academic adopters, Theta is establishing itself as an indispensable resource for research teams seeking both performance and affordability in AI experimentation.