Edge AI Architectures for a Privacy-Preserving IoT Era

Charla organizada en la Sala de Grados A, ETSI Informática.The Internet of Things (IoT) has been hailed as the next frontier of innovation where our everyday objects are connected in ways that improve our lives and transform industries, in particular healthcare. In this talk, Prof. Atienza will first discuss the challenges of ultra-low power (ULP) Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) design and communication in edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) nodes for the design of smart devices and wearables in the IoT context. Then, the opportunities for edge AI architectures to conceive the next generation of federated learning systems in healthcare, as challenging use case, will be highlighted as a scalable way to deliver the IoT concept in a privacy-preserving way. This new trend of edge AI-based MPSoC architectures will need to combine new ULP heterogeneous embedded systems, including reconfigurable neural network accelerators, as well as enabling energy-scalable software layers. The final goal is to have edge AI systems that can gracefully adapt the energy consumption and precision of the IoT application outputs according to the quality requirements of our surrounding world. Moreover, they need to be able to personalize their AI algorithms by enabling training on the edge, as living organisms do to operate efficiently in the real world.Departamento de Arquitectura de Computadore

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Reflections on the use of Project Wonderland as a mixed-reality environment for teaching and learning

This paper reflects on the lessons learnt from MiRTLE?a collaborative research project to create a ?mixed reality teaching and learning environment? that enables teachers and students participating in real-time mixed and online classes to interact with avatar representations of each other. The key hypothesis of the project is that avatar representations of teachers and students can help create a sense of shared presence, engendering a greater sense of community and improving student engagement in online lessons. This paper explores the technology that underpins such environments by presenting work on the use of a massively multi-user game server, based on Sun?s Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland tools, to create a shared teaching environment, illustrating the process by describing the creation of a virtual classroom. It is planned that the MiRTLE platform will be used in several trial applications ? which are described in the paper. These example applications are then used to explore some of the research issues arising from the use of virtual environments within an education environment. The research discussion initially focuses on the plans to assess this within the MiRTLE project. This includes some of the issues of designing virtual environments for teaching and learning, and how supporting pedagogical and social theories can inform this process

Deep Visual Foresight for Planning Robot Motion

A key challenge in scaling up robot learning to many skills and environments is removing the need for human supervision, so that robots can collect their own data and improve their own performance without being limited by the cost of requesting human feedback. Model-based reinforcement learning holds the promise of enabling an agent to learn to predict the effects of its actions, which could provide flexible predictive models for a wide range of tasks and environments, without detailed human supervision. We develop a method for combining deep action-conditioned video prediction models with model-predictive control that uses entirely unlabeled training data. Our approach does not require a calibrated camera, an instrumented training set-up, nor precise sensing and actuation. Our results show that our method enables a real robot to perform nonprehensile manipulation -- pushing objects -- and can handle novel objects not seen during training.Comment: ICRA 2017. Supplementary video: https://sites.google.com/site/robotforesight

Peripatetic electronic teachers in higher education

This paper explores the idea of information and communications technology providing a medium enabling higher education teachers to act as freelance agents. The notion of a ‘Peripatetic Electronic Teacher’ (PET) is introduced to encapsulate this idea. PETs would exist as multiple telepresences (pedagogical, professional, managerial and commercial) in PET‐worlds; global networked environments which support advanced multimedia features. The central defining rationale of a pedagogical presence is described in detail and some implications for the adoption of the PET‐world paradigm are discussed. The ideas described in this paper were developed by the author during a recently completed Short‐Term British Telecom Research Fellowship, based at the BT Adastral Park