The Edge, The Center, and Everything In-between: The Internet of Things Gets Local Smarts - Cantina

A few years ago, the TensorFlow project appeared and opened up a whole new range of machine learning capabilities. An open-source platform, with a host of tools for training and deploying machine learning models, TensorFlow has been one of the driving forces behind the rapid adoption of ML. It is a great tool for experimentation and since its initial release, TensorFlow has been ported to the browser, and integrated into mobile devices. Hardware designed and dedicated for machine learning, such as Google's Coral boards, has been bringing TensorFlow and other ML systems to the edge; that is, smaller, cheaper devices meant to be deployed out in the world, rather than big servers living in the data centers that back the Internet of Things and the cloud. But things are about to get even more interesting, because TensorFlow is starting to show up on cheap, low-power microcontrollers. This is big news in a small package.