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IBM Upgrades to Premier Membership

By August 20, 2020No Comments

The LF AI Foundation is pleased to announce that IBM has upgraded its membership from General to Premier, granting it a seat on the LF AI governing board and a voting representative on every LF AI committee. IBM now joins other leading technology companies such as AT&T, Baidu, Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, Tech Mahindra, Tencent, Zilliz and ZTE as a Premier Member, enabling and supporting a sustainable open source AI ecosystem. 

Premier membership is the LF AI’s highest tier of membership, reserved for organizations who contribute heavily to the open source artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) space. These organizations, along with members at the General and Associate levels, work in concert with LF AI team members, to take the most active role in enabling open source AI, ML and DL, growing the ecosystem, facilitating collaboration and integration efforts across projects, and spearheading efforts in areas such as interoperability, ethical and responsible AI. Learn more about joining LF AI here.

IBM has been actively involved in the LF AI Foundation since its inception, participating in its various committees and recently contributing three projects for incubation. We’re thrilled to see IBM’s continued commitment to the LF AI mission, and we look forward to partnering in this new capacity to help support open source innovation and projects within the AI, ML and DL space.

“The LF AI Foundation has created an environment that is truly advancing trustworthy artificial intelligence within the open source community,” said Todd Moore, IBM Vice President, Open Technology, “Increasing IBM’s support level to now be a Premier Member of the LF AI Foundation will aid the community and advance the future of AI.”

LF AI’s Growing Portfolio

The LF AI Foundation now has 17 hosted projects, with over 50 companies, 20 universities and 1,150 active developers contributing to these projects. In addition to our growing project portfolio, we’ve also seen significant increased participation in two key initiatives: The LF Workflow & Interop Committee and the Trusted AI Committee.

The ML Workflow & Interop Committee is focused on defining a standardized ML Workflow implemented with open source projects and tools, and promoting cross project integration and interoperability. The Trusted AI Committee is focused on creating policies, guidelines, tooling, and use cases by industry in this very important space. Both of these committees are open for participation and we welcome anyone interested to join the conversations by subscribing to the mail lists or attending an upcoming meeting; check out their wiki pages for more information. 

LF AI Membership

The LF AI Foundation now has 24 members who have hit the ground running in their engagement across the Premier, General, and Associate membership levels. We’ve seen a diverse group of companies getting involved across various industries and we welcome those interested in contributing to the support of open source projects within the AL, ML and DL space. You can think of LF AI as a greenhouse growing and sustaining open source AI, ML, and DL projects from seed to fruition. Interested in becoming a member of LF AI? Learn more membership opportunities here or email membership@lfai.foundation.

The LF AI Foundation’s mission is to build and support an open AI community, and drive open source innovation in the AI, ML and DL domains by enabling collaboration and the creation of new opportunities for all the members of the community.

LF AI Resources

Author

  • Andrew Bringaze

    Andrew Bringaze is the senior developer for The Linux Foundation. With over 10 years of experience his focus is on open source code, WordPress, React, and site security.