Microsoft made its AI work on a $10 Raspberry Pi

When you're far from a cell tower and need to figure out if that bluebird is Sialia sialis or Sialia mexicana, no cloud server is going to help you. That's why companies are squeezing AI onto portable devices, and Microsoft has just taken that to a new extreme by putting deep learning algorithms onto a Raspberry Pi. The goals is to get AI onto "dumb" devices like sprinklers, medical implants and soil sensors to make them more useful, even if there's no supercomputer or internet connection in sight. The idea came about from Microsoft Labs teams in Redmond and Bangalore, India. Ofer Dekel, who manages an AI optimization group at the Redmond Lab, was trying to figure out a way to stop squirrels from eating flower bulbs and seeds from his bird feeder.