Federated Learning- The Perfect Amalgamation of IoT and AI!

One regular Tuesday morning I was looking for new papers on edge Internet of Things networks, like we all do, and came across a new term called Federated Learning and immediately went on a quest to understand this technique. Federated Learning(FL) in its simplest form is a union between the vivacious worlds of Machine Learning and the Internet of Things. It is an ML-based solution that improves the functionality of edge devices in IoT networks. Edge devices in an Internet of Things network are the mobile devices that collect data and help in achieving the purpose of the network remotely instead of the traditionally connected nodes in a network. Our smartphones are the most common example of edge devices. According to the Google AI Blog from 2017- "Federated Learning enables mobile phones to collaboratively learn a shared prediction model while keeping all the training data on the device, decoupling the ability to do machine learning from the need to store the data in the cloud."