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Katyanna Quach Mon 10 May 2021 // 18:15 UTC Share
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In Brief What do you know? The US Postal Service uses AI technology and have GPU servers running computer vision algorithms to track items being delivered across the country.
The system is called the Edge Computing Infrastructure Program (ECIP, pronounced EE-sip) and is designed to run inference operations on machine learning models using Nvidia’s GPUs. The USPS relies on deep-learning systems to perform image recognition tasks, and hopefully speed up the mail.
“It used to take eight or 10 people several days to track down items, now it takes one or two people a couple hours,” said Todd Schimmel, the manager who oversees ECIP and other USPS systems. Schimmel hopes USPS will deploy more algorithms that can detect if the correct postage stamp has been used for a package, and to automatically read barcodes even if they’re
USPS Turns to AI at the Edge to Boost Package Processing vm/iStock.com
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An edge artificial intelligence platform recently implemented by the U.S. Postal Service is helping federal insiders trace the many millions of packages it processes each week in a matter of hours instead of multiple days.
Open-source software from Nvidia is also delivering AI models to make more use of data collected in systems at 195 Postal Service sites across the nation, the company confirmed Thursday.
“The federal government has been for the last several years talking about the importance of artificial intelligence as a strategic imperative to our nation, and as an important funding priority. It s been talked about in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon. It s been funded by billions of dollars and it s full of proof of concepts and pilots,” Nvidia’s Vice President of Federal Anthony Robbins told