SAN FRANCISCO, CA – December 16, 2024 – Theta Labs, a global leader in decentralized cloud infrastructure for AI, media, and entertainment, proudly announces its partnership with Kyung Hee University, as the 10th academic institution to join the growing Theta EdgeCloud AI network in the last few months. As one of South Korea’s most esteemed universities, Kyung Hee is known for its leadership in AI and computing research. This milestone underscores Theta’s accelerating momentum in the academic sector, reflecting a strong demand for its innovative hybrid cloud-edge GPU computing platform across leading institutions worldwide.

Kyung Hee University joins Theta’s distinguished lineup of academic partners, which includes the University of Oregon in the U.S. and nine prestigious universities in South Korea including Seoul National University, KAIST, Yonsei University, and Korea University. These collaborations empower institutions to leverage Theta’s cutting-edge EdgeCloud platform to push the boundaries of AI research.

About Professor Sung-Ho Bae and the MLVC Lab

At the heart of this collaboration is Professor Sung-Ho Bae, an accomplished scholar and leader of the Machine Learning and Visual Computing (MLVC) Lab at Kyung Hee University.

Key Milestones and Background:

• Education and Expertise: Professor Bae received his Ph.D. from KAIST, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT’s CSAIL, working with Prof. Wojciech Matusik.
• Global Recognition: With over 200 publications and multiple patents, Professor Bae has made impactful contributions to areas like model compression, generative AI, and low-level vision.
• Prestigious Awards: His accolades include the 2024 Adobe Research Gift Award, multiple Qualcomm Innovation Awards, and the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Nomination.
• Collaborative Success: Under his guidance, the MLVC Lab has published papers in leading AI conferences, such as AAAI, NeurIPS, ICCV, and ICASSP. His lab is also known for its role in advancing practical AI applications in media processing, edge computing, and anomaly detection.

Recent Achievements by MLVC Lab:

• 2024 Breakthroughs: Published four papers in ICASSP, AAAI, BMVC, and WACV, focusing on efficient AI solutions for real-time applications.
• Industrial Collaborations: Collaborated with global tech giants such as LG Energy Solutions, HANCOM, and SK Telecom on AI-driven solutions.

Driving Innovation at Kyung Hee University

With Theta EdgeCloud, Kyung Hee researchers gain access to scalable, cost-efficient GPU computing power to advance their work in AI-driven media quality enhancement, edge computing, and generative AI. This partnership reaffirms Theta’s mission to make high-performance computing more accessible and transformative for academia.

Through this partnership, Kyung Hee University researchers aim to:

• Optimize AI Workflows: Improve model training and inference efficiency using EdgeCloud
• Explore Edge AI Solutions: Drive real-time media processing and generative AI applications.
• Pioneer AI Model Compression: Develop scalable AI models for efficient AI deployments.

Quotes

Professor Sung-ho Bae:

“As Theta EdgeCloud’s 10th academic partner, we’re excited to integrate Theta’s transformative decentralized cloud platform into our research ecosystem,” said Professor Sung-Ho Bae.

 

“The scalability, performance, and affordability of Theta’s hybrid GPU computing are unmatched, allowing us to pursue various AI projects that were previously constrained by resource limitations.”

Mitch Liu, co-founder and CEO of Theta Labs:
“Once again, we’re thrilled to welcome another great academic partner to EdgeCloud, Kyung Hee University. As the 10th customer in academia in a few short months, adoption and momentum is growing quickly for Theta EdgeCloud in the research community. Professor Bae and his team are at the forefront of AI innovation, and we’re proud to support their groundbreaking work.”

About Theta Labs

Theta Labs is the leading provider of decentralized cloud infrastructure for AI, media and entertainment powered by a global network of 30,000 distributed edge nodes and a native blockchain. Backed by Samsung, Sony, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and Creative Artists Agency, Theta is among the top 10 DePIN blockchains by market capitalization on Coingecko and top AI tokens on Binance.com, Recently launched Theta EdgeCloud is the first hybrid cloud-edge computing AI platform with over 80 PetaFLOPS of on-demand distributed GPU compute power. Theta’s enterprise validator and governance council is composed of global market leaders including Google, Samsung, CAA and Binance.

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About Kyunghee University

Kyung Hee University is one of South Korea’s most prestigious and forward-thinking institutions, renowned for its commitment to academic excellence and innovation. Established in 1949, the university has a rich history of fostering global leaders across disciplines and is recognized for its cutting-edge research in fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, healthcare, and environmental science.

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The artificial intelligence sector has exploded and seems to show no signs of slowing down. However, most companies and projects utilize centralized services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud computing power, which can be costly and prone to outages.

Decentralization and blockchain are solutions to these issues, according to Theta Labs head of strategy Wes Levitt, who told The Agenda podcast that decentralized cloud computing saves customers money and offers greater reliability and flexibility.

Levitt spoke to hosts Jonathan DeYoung and Ray Salmond for episode 51 of The Agenda, where he broke down how decentralization helps democratize access to computing power, why academia has become Theta Labs’ top customer and more.

Decentralized cloud services expand access to AI

Theta Labs is the company behind Theta Network, which describes itself as a decentralized cloud for AI, media and entertainment. According to Levitt, Theta is focused on decentralizing the cloud in order “to get away from having only a few points of failure and from having near-monopolies in the case of the major cloud providers and what they can provide in pricing and other terms.”

Levitt shared that while Theta started out focused primarily on media and entertainment, it has seen a massive influx in AI-related customers since the current AI boom began. One particular sector that has found decentralized cloud computing especially useful is academia. “The strongest inroads we’ve made in the last six to 12 months has been in academia, actually,” he said. 

“We caught on with KAIST, a university in Korea, and pretty quickly we were able to expand to four out of the five top Korean universities,” he explained, adding that Theta also “recently signed on University of Oregon and [is] talking now to a few of the US universities.”

“It’s not a model that really fits for them to say, ‘We’re going to sign a three-year contract with heavy commitments on it.’ They want to have flexibility and be able to use a lot when they want, and not pay for times when they’re not.”

Theta Labs vs. Amazon Web Services

The decentralized AI niche within the blockchain space has exploded over the past year. According to data from CoinMarketCap, the market capitalization of AI and big data crypto projects has grown from $16.17 billion in December 2023 to peak at over $70 billion on Dec. 6, 2024.

                   Market capitalization of AI and big data tokens. Source: CoinMarketCap