Breakthrough in energy efficient artificial intelligence

Thanks to a mathematical breakthrough, AI applications like speech recognition, gesture recognition and ECG classification can become a hundred to a thousand times more energy efficient. This means it will be possible to put much more elaborate AI in chips, enabling applications to run on a smartphone or smartwatch where before this was done in the cloud. Running the AI on local devices makes the applications more robust and privacy-friendly--robust, because a network connection with the cloud is no longer necessary. And more privacy friendly because data can be stored and processed locally. The mathematical breakthrough has been achieved by researchers of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the Dutch national research center for mathematics and computer science, together with the IMEC/Holst Research Center from Eindhoven, The Netherlands.