Intel's 'neural network on a stick' brings AI training to you

Ahead of its first AI developers conference in Beijing, Intel has announced it's making the process of imparting intelligence into smart home gadgets and other network edge devices faster and easier thanks to the company's latest invention: the Neural Compute Stick 2. Edge devices are generally defined as any piece of hardware that controls the flow of data between the boundaries of two networks. These include not just routers, switches and gateways but also a range IoT gadgets like Ring doorbell cameras, industrial robots, smart medical devices or self-guided camera drones. Intel's NCS2 is essentially a self-contained neural network on a thumbdrive and should make developing those sorts of devices faster and easier by offloading much of the processing power required to train them to its onboard Movidius Myriad X vision processing unit (VPU). "We can do some incredible things with artificial intelligence, and one of the fastest growing data types, as we all know, is video data," Steen Graham, General Manager of Channels and Ecosystem in Intel's Internet of Things group, told reporters during a press call on Friday. "The camera is the ultimate sensor."