The dAIEDGE Network of Excellence (NoE) seeks to strengthen and support the development of a dynamic European cutting-edge Artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem under the umbrella of the European Lighthouse for AI, and to sustain the development of advanced AI. dAIEDGE fosters the exchange of ideas, concepts, and trends on cutting-edge next generation AI, creating links between ecosystem actors to help both the European Commission (EC) and the European Union (EU) and the peripheral AI constituency identify strategies for future developments in Europe. Our main objective is to advance Europe’s innovation and technology base by developing a comprehensive policy and governance approach to AI in order for the EU to become a world leader in innovation in the data economy and its applications.

Deep Neural Network-based Keyword Spotting accuracy degrades in noisy environments. On-site adaptation to previously unseen noise is crucial to recover accuracy loss, and on-device learning is required in scenarios where adaptation has to happen in the field. In this work, we propose a fully on-device domain adaptation system, enabling edge devices to achieve noise-robust keyword spotting. We achieve up to 14% accuracy gains over already-robust keyword spotting models, and up to 21% increments when evaluating our methodology on keyword datasets disjoint from the offline training set. In extreme edge scenarios where Keyword Spotting is critical, using as little as 10 kB of memory and only 100 labeled utterances, we enable on-device learning and demonstrate accuracy recovery of up to 5% after adapting to complex, non-stationary speech noise. We show that domain adaptation can be achieved on ultra-low-power microcontrollers with as little as 357 mJ within 14 seconds on always-on, battery-operated devices. This work is the first to demonstrate an end-to-end on-device domain adaptation system for noise robust keyword spotting models on ultra-low-power, extreme edge platforms.

Standard-size autonomous navigation vehicles have rapidly improved thanks to the breakthroughs of deep learning. However, scaling autonomous driving to low-power systems deployed on dynamic environments poses several challenges that prevent their adoption. To address them, we propose a closed- loop learning flow for autonomous driving mini-vehicles that includes the target environment in-the-loop. We leverage a family of compact and high-throughput tinyCNNs to control the mini- vehicle, which learn in the target environment by imitating a computer vision algorithm, i.e., the expert. Thus, the tinyCNNs, having only access to an on-board fast-rate linear camera, gain robustness to lighting conditions and improve over time. Further, we leverage GAP8, a parallel ultra-low-power RISC-V SoC, to meet the inference requirements. When running the family of CNNs, our GAP8's solution outperforms any other implementation on the STM32L4 and NXP k64f (Cortex-M4), reducing the latency by over 13x and the energy consummation by 92%.

The spread of deep learning on embedded devices has prompted the development of numerous methods to optimize the deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs). Works have mainly focused on: 1) efficient DNN architectures; 2) network optimization techniques, such as pruning and quantization; 3) optimized algorithms to speed up the execution of the most computational intensive layers; and 4) dedicated hardware to accelerate the data flow and computation. However, there is a lack of research on cross-level optimization as the space of approaches becomes too large to test and obtain a globally optimized solution. Thus, leading to suboptimal deployment in terms of latency, accuracy, and memory. In this work, we first detail and analyze the methods to improve the deployment of DNNs across the different levels of software optimization. Building on this knowledge, we present an automated exploration framework to ease the deployment of DNNs. The framework relies on a reinforcement learning search that, combined with a deep learning inference framework, automatically explores the design space and learns an optimized solution that speeds up the performance and reduces the memory on embedded CPU platforms. Thus, we present a set of results for state-of-the-art DNNs on a range of Arm Cortex-A CPU platforms achieving up to$4\times $improvement in performance and over$2\times $reduction in memory with negligible loss in accuracy with respect to the BLAS floating-point implementation.

Next generation of embedded Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems are interconnected and collaborative systems able to perform autonomous tasks. The remarkable expansion of the embedded ICT market, together with the rise and breakthroughs of Artificial Intelligence (AI), have put the focus on the Edge as it stands as one of the keys for the next technological revolution: the seamless integration of AI in our daily life. However, training and deployment of custom AI solutions on embedded devices require a fine-grained integration of data, algorithms, and tools to achieve high accuracy and overcome functional and non-functional requirements. Such integration requires a high level of expertise that becomes a real bottleneck for small and medium enterprises wanting to deploy AI solutions on the Edge , which, ultimately, slows down the adoption of AI on applications in our daily life. In this work, we present a modular AI pipeline as an integrating framework to bring data, algorithms, and deployment tools together. By removing the integration barriers and lowering the required expertise, we can interconnect the different stages of particular tools and provide a modular end-to-end development of AI products for embedded devices. Our AI pipeline consists of four modular main steps: (i) data ingestion, (ii) model training, (iii) deployment optimization, and (iv) the IoT hub integration. To show the effectiveness of our pipeline, we provide examples of different AI applications during each of the steps. Besides, we integrate our deployment framework, Low-Power Deep Neural Network (LPDNN), into the AI pipeline and present its lightweight architecture and deployment capabilities for embedded devices. Finally, we demonstrate the results of the AI pipeline by showing the deployment of several AI applications such as keyword spotting, image classification, and object detection on a set of well-known embedded platforms, where LPDNN consistently outperforms all other popular deployment frameworks.

Deep Learning is increasingly being adopted by industry for computer vision applications running on embedded devices. While Convolutional Neural Networks' accuracy has achieved a mature and remarkable state, inference latency and throughput are a major concern especially when targeting low-cost and low-power embedded platforms. CNNs' inference latency may become a bottleneck for Deep Learning adoption by industry, as it is a crucial specification for many real-time processes. Furthermore, deployment of CNNs across heterogeneous platforms presents major compatibility issues due to vendor-specific technology and acceleration libraries.In this work, we present QS-DNN, a fully automatic search based on Reinforcement Learning which, combined with an inference engine optimizer, efficiently explores through the design space and empirically finds the optimal combinations of libraries and primitives to speed up the inference of CNNs on heterogeneous embedded devices. We show that, an optimized combination can achieve 45x speedup in inference latency on CPU compared to a dependency-free baseline and 2x on average on GPGPU compared to the best vendor library. Further, we demonstrate that, the quality of results and time "to-solution" is much better than with Random Search and achieves up to 15x better results for a short-time search.

Bonseyes is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform composed of a Data Marketplace, a Deep Learning Toolbox, and Developer Reference Platforms with the aim of facilitating tech and non-tech companies a rapid adoption of AI as an enabler for their business. Bonseyes provides methods and tools to speed up the development and deployment of AI solutions on low power Internet of Things (IoT) devices, embedded computing systems, and data centre servers. In this work, we address the deployment and the integration of Bonseyes AI applications in a wider enterprise application landscape involving different applications and services. We leverage the well-established IoT platform FIWARE to integrate the Bonseyes AI applications into an enterprise ecosystem. This paper presents two AI application deployment and integration scenarios using FIWARE. The first scenario addresses use cases where edge devices have enough compute power to run the AI applications and there is only need to transmit the results to the enterprise ecosystem. The second scenario copes with use cases where an edge device may delegate most of the computation to an external/cloud server. Further, we employ FIWARE IoT Agent generic enabler to manage all edge devices related to Bonseyes AI applications. Both scenarios have been validated on concrete use cases and demonstrators.

Deep Learning is moving to edge devices, ushering in a new age of distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI). The high demand of computational resources required by deep neural networks may be alleviated by approximate computing techniques, and most notably reduced-precision arithmetic with coarsely quantized numerical representations. In this context, Bonseyes comes in as an initiative to enable stakeholders to bring AI to low-power and autonomous environments such as: Automotive, Medical Healthcare and Consumer Electronics. To achieve this, we introduce LPDNN, a framework for optimized deployment of Deep Neural Networks on heterogeneous embedded devices. In this work, we detail the quantization engine that is integrated in LPDNN. The engine depends on a fine-grained workflow which enables a Neural Network Design Exploration and a sensitivity analysis of each layer for quantization. We demonstrate the engine with a case study on Alexnet and VGG16 for three different techniques for direct quantization: standard fixed-point, dynamic fixed-point and k-means clustering, and demonstrate the potential of the latter. We argue that using a Gaussian quantizer with k-means clustering can achieve better performance than linear quantizers. Without retraining, we achieve over 55.64% saving for weights' storage and 69.17% for run-time memory accesses with less than 1% drop in top5 accuracy in Imagenet.