Dr. Tarek Abdelzaher
Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Advances in neural network revolutionized modern machine intelligence, but important challenges remain when applying these solutions in IoT contexts; specifically, in cost-sensitive applications and at the point of need on lower-end embedded devices. The talk discusses challenges in offering real-time machine intelligence services at the edge to support IoT applications in resource constrained environments. The intersection of IoT applications, real-time requirements, and AI capabilities motivates several important research directions. For example, how to support efficient execution of machine learning components on low-cost edge devices while retaining inference quality and offering confidence estimates in results? How to reduce the need for expensive manual labeling of IoT application data? How to improve the responsiveness of AI components to critical real-time stimuli in their physical environment? How to prioritize and schedule the execution of intelligent data processing workflows on edge-device GPUs? How to exploit data transformations that lead to sparser representations of external physical phenomena to attain more efficient learning and inference? The talk discusses challenges in edge AI applications from a real-time computing perspective.