Nvidia online GTC event will feature 200 sessions on AI, the metaverse, and Omniverse

Nvidia said it will host its next GTC conference virtually from Sept. 19 to September 22, featuring a keynote by CEO Jensen Huang and more than 200 tech sessions.

Huang will talk about AI and the Omniverse, which is Nvidia’s simulation environment for creating metaverse-like virtual worlds. More than 40 of the 200 talks will focus on the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. I’ll be moderating a session on the industrial applications of the metaverse with speakers from Mercedes-Benz, Siemens and Magic Leap executives, as well Metaverse book author Matthew Ball. (We’ll have similar metaverse sessions at our MetaBeat event and Ball is also speaking at our GamesBeat Summit Next 2022 event in October).

GTC will also feature a fireside chat with Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio, Geoff Hinton and Yann
LeCun discussing how AI will evolve and help solve challenging problems. The discussion will be
moderated by Sanja Fidler, vice president of AI Research at Nvidia.

GTC talks will explore some of the key advances driving AI and the metaverse — including large language
models, natural language processing, digital twins, digital biology, robotics and climate science.

Major talks

Other major talks will explore:

• BMW, ILM, Kroger, Lowe’s, Siemens, Nvidia and others on using digital twins for a range of applications, from manufacturing to neurosurgery to climate modeling
• ByteDance’s deployment of large-scale GPU clusters for machine learning and deep learning
• Medtronic’s use of AI for robotic surgery and the operating room of the future
• Boeing’s digital transformation enabling aircraft engineering and production to be more flexible and efficient
• Deutsche Bank’s adoption of AI and cloud technologies to improve the customer experience
• Johnson & Johnson’s use of hybrid cloud computing for healthcare, plus a session on its use of quantum computing simulation for pharmaceutical research
• How pharmaceutical companies can use transformer AI models and digital twins to accelerate drug discovery
• United Nations and Nvidia scientists discussing AI for climate modeling, including disaster prediction, deforestation and agriculture
• Amazon Web Services, Ericsson, Verizon and Nvidia leaders describing augmented- and virtual-reality applications for 5G and optimizing 5G deployment with digital twins
• Adobe, Pixar and Nvidia leaders explaining how Universal Scene Description is becoming a standard for the metaverse.

Nvidia said GTC offers a range of sessions tailored for many different audiences, including business executives, data scientists, enterprise IT leaders, designers, developers, researchers and students. It will have content for participants at all stages of their careers with learning-and-development
opportunities, many of which are free.

Developers, researchers and students can sign up for 135 sessions on a broad range of topics, including:

• 5 Paths to a Career in AI
• Accelerating AI workflows and maximizing investments in cloud infrastructure
• The AI journey from academics to entrepreneurship
• Applying lessons from Kaggle-winning solutions to real-world problems
• Developing HPC applications with standard C++, Fortran and Python
• Defining the quantum-accelerated supercomputer
• Insights from Nvidia Research

Attendees can sign up for hands-on, full-day technical workshops and two-hour training labs offered by the Nvidia Deep Learning Institute (DLI). Twenty workshops are available in multiple time zones and languages, and more than 25 free training labs are available in accelerated computing, computer vision, data science, conversational AI, natural language processing and other topics.

Registrants may attend free two-hour training labs or sign up for full-day DLI workshops at a discounted
rate of $99 through Thursday, Aug. 29, and $149 through GTC.

Insights for business leaders

This GTC will feature more than 30 sessions from companies in key industry sectors, including financial services, industrial, retail, automotive and healthcare. Speakers will share detailed insights to advance business using AI and metaverse technology, including: building AI centers; the business value of digital twins; and new technologies that will define how we live, work and play.

In addition to those from the companies listed above, senior executives from AT&T, BMW, Fox Sports,
Lucid Motors, Medtronic, Meta, NIO, Pinterest, Polestar, United Airlines and U.S. Bank are among the
industry leaders scheduled to present.

Sessions for startups

NVIDIA Inception, a global program with more than 11,000 startups, will host several sessions, including:

● AI for VCs: Six startup leaders describe how they are driving advancements from robotics to
restaurants
● How NVIDIA Inception startups are advancing healthcare and life sciences
● How NVIDIA technologies can help startups
● Revolutionizing agriculture with AI in emerging markets

Registration is free and open now. Huang’s keynote will be livestreamed on Tuesday, Sept. 20, at 8 a.m. Pacific and available on demand afterward. Registration is not required to view the keynote.

I asked Nvidia why it is doing the event virtually again, given a lot of conferences are happening in-person. The company said that, when planning this event many months ago, Covid-19 remained unpredictable and the numbers were rising again, so it felt safer to run virtually. This also allowed Nvidia to include more developers and tech leaders from around the world.

Metaverse highlights

As for the Omniverse and metaverse, Nvidia said GTC will once again be about AI and computing across a variety of domains from the data center to the cloud to the edge. 

More than 40 of the event’s 200-plus sessions will focus on the metaverse, and Huang will use his keynote to share the latest breakthroughs in Omniverse, among other technologies. 

Here are some of the other metaverse session highlights: 

• Wes Rhodes, Kroger’s VP of Technology Transformation and R&D, will participate in a fireside chat on using simulation and digital twins for optimizing store layouts and checkout. 
• Cedrik Neike, Board Member and CEO of Digital Industries at Siemens AG, will describe how Siemens is working with Nvidia to build photorealistic, physics-based industrial digital twins. 
• Executives from Lowe’s Innovation Labs will explain how the metaverse will help customers visualize room design. 
• Anima Anandkumar, Senior Director of ML Research at Nvidia, and Karthik Kashinath, AI-HPC scientist and Earth-2 engineering lead, will share progress towards building Nvidia’s Earth-2 digital twin. 
• Industrial Light & Magic will describe how digital artists are using Omniverse to create photorealistic digital sets and environments that can be manipulated in real time. 

Other metaverse-related talks will focus on: 

• Using digital twins to automate factories and operate robots safely alongside humans
• Building large-scale, photorealistic worlds
• Using digital twins for brain surgery