This summer Microsoft released the CNTK 2.0,  C++ open source, cross-platform and cross-OS library for deep learning based on deep neural network (NN). As they said this is the fastest NN library today, which is several times faster than related competitors libraries: TensorFlow, Caffe, Theno and Torch. From the demos which are included in the library it can be said this is very powerfully library, which can be of huge help for those who is doing Data Science and Machine Learning.

Actually CNTK is created by Microsoft speech researcher in 2012, and few years after it became the open source library at the codeplex site in early 2015. A year later it is moved to GitHub, by announcing CNTK 1.0. The first version released in January 2016 as the open source project on GitHub http://github.com/microsoft/CNTK .

In June this year the CNTK 2.0 is released with lot of improvements and benchmarks. In September CNTK 2.2 is released by fully supporting the .NET platform which allows .NET developers to include the library in .NET based applications.

Beside C#, CNTK support C++ as native support, as well as Python which is proven to be first class citizen for this library.

Later the library will be ported on Java and R.