Markets are subject to fads and the embedded-control sector is far from immune to them. In the 1990s, fuzzy logic seemed to be the way forward and microcontroller (MCU) vendors scrambled to put support into their offerings only to see it flame out. Embedded machine learning (ML) is seeing a far bigger feeding frenzy as established MCU players and AI-acceleration start-ups try to demonstrate their commitment to the idea, which mostly goes under the banner of TinyML. Daniel Situnayake, founding TinyML engineer at software-tools company Edge Impulse and co-author of a renowned book on the technology, says the situation today is very different to that of the 1990s. "The exciting thing about embedded ML is that machine learning and deep learning are not new, unproven technologies - they've in fact been deployed successfully on server-class computers for a relatively long time, and are at the heart of a ton of successful products. Embedded ML is about applying a proven set of technologies to a new context that will enable many new applications that were not previously possible."

At QCon SF, Daniel Situnayake presented "Machine learning on mobile and edge devices with TensorFlow Lite". TensorFlow Lite is a production-ready, cross-platform framework for deploying ML on mobile devices and embedded systems, and was the main topic of the presentation. The key takeaways from it included understanding and getting started with TensorFlow Lite, and on-device machine learning on various devices – specifically microcontrollers and optimizing the performance of machine learning models. Situnayake, developer advocate for TensorFlow Lite at Google, began the presentation by explaining what machine learning is. Traditionally a developer feeds rules and data into an application and output answers, while with machine learning the developer or data scientists' feeds in the answers and data and the output are rules, which can be applied in the future.