This SWF/eetimes article discusses SensiML's automated model building - similar to Edge Impulse. So, for those who've been wondering why I've been banging on about Edge impulse recently, this explains it much more clearly than I could.
Models are a keystone of any NN application.
Here are some extracts from the article:
SensiML Open-Sources TinyML Auto ML Tools - EE Times Podcast
The other is that this is a realm that’s typically been data firmware engineers and people that are more skilled in embedded development, not necessarily AI and machine learning skill sets. And we’ve seen that a lot in customer interactions we’ve had, is often admitted the first AI project that a team has undertaken. So they are going through the learning curve themselves on what it takes to get the project to be successful. And so there’s that issue as well.
And when we’re looking at AI at the edge, it may or may not be those types of applications, because some of these are physical sensors where you’ve got to collect data that isn’t readily available in large quantity for training. So somebody has to go do that work in order to have something that’s an input to train the models. So those kinds of things together kind of make this a challenging space that, you know, we’re seeing some of those friction points now.
So Data Studio is all about capturing sensor data, labeling that data, sort of if you think of your traditional supervised ML data set, you’ve got not only the source data that you’re looking to train, but you also have kind of the answers of what are you expecting that data to provide as the insight, and you’re using that to generalize a model. So the data studio is all about collecting and basically curating those data sets. It’s an ML data ops tool as a utility. The Analytic Studio is the one that we’re open sourcing. And that is an AutoML tool. And by AutoML, for those that aren’t familiar perhaps with that term, AutoML is basically using machine learning to develop machine learning. So taking the same schemes that you’re using for the inference model, but also going through a training process of saying, you know, there are a variety of different approaches I could take to building the model itself. I could either put that in the hands of somebody who’s knowing and wise in AI, and knows what kinds of models and how to configure those models, or I can use the power of computing in the cloud to do a search algorithm and come up with what those things should be. So AutoML tools I think really help empower the embedded developer to be able to do the kinds of things that data scientists could do, as well as as a work aid for data scientists who don’t have to necessarily do all that work manually and can leverage the AutoML capabilities as a work aid for productivity and being able to look at a much broader space of models potentially. o that’s what the Analytic Studio does. It basically takes the training data on the input side and what it spits out on the other side is a functioning model. And in the case of Analytic Studio, it takes the model and reduces it to actual Seek source code that can be readily integrated into your firmware for that edge device.
I think there’s a lot of need for explainability, transparency, and understanding what these models are actually doing. If you’re going to build a product, you need to support that product. And so if customers come back and say this isn’t behaving the way we thought it was going to behave, if it’s a black box, how do I know how to support that and to remedy the situation? So you want as much explainability in the model as you can, and certainly having the ability to look under the hood and see what’s going on, not only in the model, but also the tools that are used to build the model have some benefit. That’s one piece of it. For us, I think even the more interesting piece is that as a small development team that’s building these tools, there’s only so much that we personally can do if we’re working on this in sort of the traditional proprietary software sense of taking on a software roadmap and building features in at the rate we are able to do so. We looked at some of the other examples out there and saw that the open-source model as a development model just makes a lot of sense. You have to give something to get something. In our cases, giving our foundation code for the Analytic Studio seemed like a reasonable trade* for the prospect of being able to build the community out there that could go after some of the new emerging technologies that are being talked about, that show a lot of promise for addressing some of the bottlenecks that we talked about earlier.
* [ As Sir Humphrey would have said: “That would be a very courageous move, Minister.”]
Models are a keystone of any NN application.
Here are some extracts from the article:
SensiML Open-Sources TinyML Auto ML Tools - EE Times Podcast
The other is that this is a realm that’s typically been data firmware engineers and people that are more skilled in embedded development, not necessarily AI and machine learning skill sets. And we’ve seen that a lot in customer interactions we’ve had, is often admitted the first AI project that a team has undertaken. So they are going through the learning curve themselves on what it takes to get the project to be successful. And so there’s that issue as well.
And when we’re looking at AI at the edge, it may or may not be those types of applications, because some of these are physical sensors where you’ve got to collect data that isn’t readily available in large quantity for training. So somebody has to go do that work in order to have something that’s an input to train the models. So those kinds of things together kind of make this a challenging space that, you know, we’re seeing some of those friction points now.
So Data Studio is all about capturing sensor data, labeling that data, sort of if you think of your traditional supervised ML data set, you’ve got not only the source data that you’re looking to train, but you also have kind of the answers of what are you expecting that data to provide as the insight, and you’re using that to generalize a model. So the data studio is all about collecting and basically curating those data sets. It’s an ML data ops tool as a utility. The Analytic Studio is the one that we’re open sourcing. And that is an AutoML tool. And by AutoML, for those that aren’t familiar perhaps with that term, AutoML is basically using machine learning to develop machine learning. So taking the same schemes that you’re using for the inference model, but also going through a training process of saying, you know, there are a variety of different approaches I could take to building the model itself. I could either put that in the hands of somebody who’s knowing and wise in AI, and knows what kinds of models and how to configure those models, or I can use the power of computing in the cloud to do a search algorithm and come up with what those things should be. So AutoML tools I think really help empower the embedded developer to be able to do the kinds of things that data scientists could do, as well as as a work aid for data scientists who don’t have to necessarily do all that work manually and can leverage the AutoML capabilities as a work aid for productivity and being able to look at a much broader space of models potentially. o that’s what the Analytic Studio does. It basically takes the training data on the input side and what it spits out on the other side is a functioning model. And in the case of Analytic Studio, it takes the model and reduces it to actual Seek source code that can be readily integrated into your firmware for that edge device.
I think there’s a lot of need for explainability, transparency, and understanding what these models are actually doing. If you’re going to build a product, you need to support that product. And so if customers come back and say this isn’t behaving the way we thought it was going to behave, if it’s a black box, how do I know how to support that and to remedy the situation? So you want as much explainability in the model as you can, and certainly having the ability to look under the hood and see what’s going on, not only in the model, but also the tools that are used to build the model have some benefit. That’s one piece of it. For us, I think even the more interesting piece is that as a small development team that’s building these tools, there’s only so much that we personally can do if we’re working on this in sort of the traditional proprietary software sense of taking on a software roadmap and building features in at the rate we are able to do so. We looked at some of the other examples out there and saw that the open-source model as a development model just makes a lot of sense. You have to give something to get something. In our cases, giving our foundation code for the Analytic Studio seemed like a reasonable trade* for the prospect of being able to build the community out there that could go after some of the new emerging technologies that are being talked about, that show a lot of promise for addressing some of the bottlenecks that we talked about earlier.
* [ As Sir Humphrey would have said: “That would be a very courageous move, Minister.”]
Last edited: