2001: Odyssey in Space, Ex machina and I, Robot are some examples of Artificial Intelligence treated by science fiction. Thinking beings, who after interacting with us consider their own existence and the conflict begins. Despite being very interesting works for reflection, Artificial Intelligence is a current programming discipline that does not have to do with consciousness. It is a reality and Intel Movidius is a development USB at our disposal.

We have tested it and then we give you a brushstroke of the AI ​​and what role does this development stick that Intel offers us. Do you want to know more about this artificial intelligence? Do not miss our analysis.

What is Artificial Intelligence currently implemented?

AI or Artificial Intelligence has been described in futuristic literature and by some scholars as the ability of a computer system to think psychologically as a human would. Reflections on what consciousness is and what it derives from the fact that a program can acquire it feed the furnaces of the imagination in books, movies and series.

But other branches of academics, researchers, and programmers define it in more concrete terms. If we understand intelligence as the structured ability to solve problems, it is much closer to what we understand as a computer program. The artificial intelligence that is so much talked about today is of this type, computer programs that try to solve problems and improve the way they do it with their experience.

What Artificial Intelligence solves and how

If the Artificial Intelligence we are talking about is not a consciousness but a program that solves problems, what differentiates it from "conventional programming"?

Like us, different types of AI try to solve a problem by trying it several times until they find the best method to do it. To learn, the program is mathematically structured and literally trained with data. Each time it becomes better to give a result to the problem, and if it continues learning with more data, it reorients the algorithm that seeks the solution.

Intel Movidius: AI development in our hands

Like 3D and image processing, Artificial Intelligence algorithms are very complex to the logic of a conventional CPU and can be accelerated by hardware. GPU hardware acceleration was a first step that manufacturers made available to us, but embedded or integrated products will not carry € 300 graphics cards that consume 80W.

For applications such as a security camera or a drone, what we call embedded or integrated systems, the consumption and size on the electronic board must be minimal. The same is true for smartphones, which are relegating image processing to chips with AI hardware acceleration.

So manufacturers like Intel are developing and offering chips that can be integrated into applications of this type. Intel Movidius is a software and hardware platform that does just that, running Artificial Intelligence on a relatively powerful, low-power, small chip. With 1W it is capable of performing image processing tasks such as face recognition, objects… with a performance of 100 GFlops. It is a lower result than what a GPU gives but enough for the AI ​​tasks that are asked of it and it can be integrated into the electronic design of a final product.

Intel Movidius: is a USB integrated ?

Depending on the application, you can simplify the electronic design and always have the Intel Movidius USB connected. If not, of course, in most cases, what is the Movidius USB for then?

When designing a device (smartphone, fridge, car, security camera…), one of its most important parts is the electronic board. For electronics and programming to go well together, decisions must be made with both categories in mind. When choosing the processors and drivers to be deployed on the PCB, choosing chips that will make things easier by accelerating is key.

That is why Intel wants to sell millions of Movidius chips that device manufacturers will integrate into the boards of their products, and to sell the Movidius USB that allows any developer to train and program for their own platform in a cheap and accessible way. The technical team will choose the chip and software that is most accessible and robust, and the Movidius stick allows AI developments without having yet made the electronic board of the final product, and then they ensure that these companies will buy their chips for their products.

An example of integrated AI that could be done with Intel Movidius

If we are going to design a forest camera that will try to measure the lynx population in a specific area, Artificial Intelligence will allow the same camera, before connecting with anyone, to perform the reconnaissance and send a simple message saying "I have seen a lynx" in instead of sending images and that the server executes Artificial Intelligence.

With this we save bandwidth and connection costs since very simple messages can be used. Also the server can be much simpler, and we will be doing fog computing rather than cloud computing . If instead of keeping the server in our facilities we are paying Amazon or Google to use computing resources on their servers, the cost of just keeping a record of the messages "I have seen a lynx" is much less than receiving large amounts data in image format, process them through AI and have the registry, all on the server. We talk about thousands of euros periodically.

We have tried

We have been doing a few tests with the AI ​​programs that Intel gives us already compiled. These programs have been coded using Tensorflow and trained with many photos of different objects. When we run the program telling it to look for a photo that we have put on it, it tells us the probability of 0 to 1 that it is an object of the categories that it has trained.

We see how AI works in a probabilistic way and being trained through data. The examples that Intel gives us are quite impressive, because they hit with a confidence level greater than 90% the photos that we give them among 1001 categories.

What a badge! This… Conclusions

In the development of a product that has electronics and programming, you must always take into account how and where the data is processed. This is especially true, currently, in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and Intel is one of the manufacturers that puts tools to achieve better results with the Movidius platform.

The USB stick with hardware accelerated Artificial Intelligence is intended to facilitate the training and programming of developers, and to be able to sell the Movidius chips so that they can be integrated into each of the final products that result from those projects.