Edge AI

A solution for the ever-growing amount of data in manufacturing and process industries.

  • Edge AI

The term “Edge AI” might be the new buzzword of 2019/2020, much like “Internet of Things” was in 2016/2017. To understand this growing new trend, we need to provide a solid definition of what constitutes “Artificial Intelligence on the Edge.”

Most IoT configurations look something like the image left. Sensors or devices are connected directly to the Internet through a router, providing raw data to a backend server. Machine learning algorithms can be run on these servers to help predict a variety of cases that might interest managers.

However, things get tricky when too many devices begin to clog the network traffic. Perhaps there’s too much traffic on local WiFi or there’s too much data being piped to the remote server (and you don’t want to pay for that). To help alleviate some of these issues, we can begin to run less complex machine learning algorithms on a local server or even the devices themselves.

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    • Solution AI Edge

A key feature of both projects is how they combine digital and analog technologies to harness the benefits of both. “Multiplications and additions can be effectively performed as analog processes, so for these applications we can do without a complex digital circuit that would demand a great deal of energy,” explains Dr. Loreto Mateu, group manager at the Smart Sensing and Electronics division, who is in charge of the development of analog components. The control systems, meanwhile, require digital circuits created by Breiling’s team. It is this combination of analog and digital circuits developed specifically for certain AI applications that makes Edge-AI even possible.

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  • Our vision of an edge AI net

Our vision of an edge AI net is an open software platform to market and deliver intelligent edge AI services to a private peer to peer mesh network of edge AI AIoT devices using cloud native technology. In delivering intelligent AI services, valuable data being generated are guaranteed data accuracy by AI and data integrity by employing blockchain technology.

Supporting Edge AI services is one of the most exciting features of future mobile networks. These services involve the collection and processing of voluminous data streams, right at the network edge, so as to offer real-time and accurate inferences to users. However, their widespread deployment is hampered by the energy cost they induce to the network. To overcome this obstacle, we propose a Bayesian learning framework for jointly configuring the service and the Radio Access Network (RAN), aiming to minimize the total energy consumption while respecting desirable accuracy and latency thresholds. Using a fully-fledged prototype with a software-defined base station (BS) and a GPU-enabled edge server, we profile a state-of-the-art video analytics AI service and identify new performance trade-offs. Accordingly, we tailor the optimization framework to account for the network context, the user needs, and the service metrics. The efficacy of our proposal is verified in a series of experiments and comparisons with neural network-based benchmarks.