Wrapping Up a Year of Immense Progress

By Leena Joshi

“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other.”

-Walter Elliot

It has been my honor to join the amazingly talented Petuum team last year. As a newcomer, I am continually astounded by the progress the Petuum team has made in only its second full year of operations. It is my privilege to chronicle the team’s accomplishments from the course of a busy and fulfilling 2018.

The Petuum journey in 2018 has been remarkable on many levels. The numbers below reflect both the tremendous growth and the phenomenal quality of work our team has done -

129%

From the very beginning, talent has been both our biggest strength and the top priority at Petuum. The best machine learning talent in the world applied to the problem of making AI accessible is sure to yield the best results. The Petuum team grew 129 percent in 2018, a crazy achievement for everyone involved!

30,000

That’s the total number of citations obtained by our talented researchers and their work. Thanks to them, even at our size, we have an immense effect on the world of artificial intelligence. Words can’t express how proud we are of them and their accomplishments.

15,346

Housing talent does not come easy, but we made it happen. We opened two new offices in California, expanding 15,346 square feet for a 300 percent growth. We have plans to grow even more in 2019. We initially opened offices in Pittsburgh and Sunnyvale because machine learning talent is clustered (no pun intended) in these areas, but we will soon add additional locations to diversify our presence worldwide. Our HR and facilities teams worked non-stop and around the clock!

8

Petuum researchers achieved eight accepted papers, two workshop presentations and three top place competition wins[1] at NeurIPS 2018 putting us at the top with Google Research, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM Research and Deepmind. Petuum also had five papers accepted at ICML and two at USENIX ATC 2018. The depth of our research and its recognition by the community is a great honor for us.

1 of 61

World Economic Forum, the international organization for public-private cooperation, recognized Petuum as a 2018 Technology Pioneer. This honor for us comes as a recognition of the central place machine learning is now taking as a significant and disruptive technology trend.

There were, of course, many more awards and recognition. Some of these are below:

• Top 25 AI company according to the AI Time Journal
• CB Insights Top 100 of the most promising private artificial intelligence companies in the world
• 2018 Innovator Award for Dr. Pengtao Xie by Pittsburgh Business Times
• AI Innovator of the Year — Pittsburgh Technology Council
• Silicon Valley Timmy Award runner-up for Best Tech Startup
• Pittsburgh Business Times — 30 under 30 — Wei (David) Dai
• The Tech Tribune — 10 Best Startups in Pennsylvania

While we reflect on what we’ve accomplished so far, and prepare for an ambitious 2019, we’re keenly aware of the challenges that lie ahead and energized to overcome each one. Watch this space. Amazing things are about to happen.

[1] two 1st place winners and one 3rd place