Embedded Machine Learning

Introduction

Machine learning (ML) enables us to teach computers the ability to learn from experience E with respect to some tasks T and performance measure P, without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning has been proved that it can be very effective to make sense of sensor data, especially with deep neural networks.


The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) shifts the future of machine learning from clouds toward the edge with small, embedded devices. There is a variety of reasons for this including communication cost, coverage, latency, privacy, security and safety.


While machine learning usually requires heavy-duty power-hungry processors and a large dataset, embedded devices have limited computing power and small dataset. Making machine learning algorithms efficient to run on resource-constrained devices like microcontrollers for a year even more with a single coin battery is very demanding, especially for real-time applications with image and speech processing such as image recognition, segmentation, object localisation, multi-channel speech enhancement, and speech recognition.

Suggested Topics

Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:


Machine learning for embedded devices

  • Compression of neural networks for inference deployment, including methods for quantization (including binarization), pruning, knowledge distillation, structural efficiency and neural architecture search

  • Learning on edge devices, including federated and continuous learning

  • Learning from limited labelled data, including methods for self-taught learning, transfer learning, unsupervised learning, generative models, and latent representation learning

  • Exploring new ML models designed to use on designated device hardware

  • New benchmarks suited to edge devices and learning on the edge scenarios

  • New and emerging applications that require the use of ML on resource-constrained hardware


Embedded systems for machine learning

  • Future emerging processors and technologies for use in resource-constrained environments

  • Hardware security/privacy

  • Low-power wireless systems

  • Energy management and smart grids

  • Network on a chip