Posted by HyeJung Lee, MJ You, ML Ecosystem Community Managers
Google Developers Experts (GDE) is a community of passionate developers who love to share their knowledge with others. Many of them specialize in Machine Learning (ML).
Here are some highlights showcasing the ML GDEs achievements from last quarter, which contributed to the global ML ecosystem. If you are interested in becoming an ML GDE, please scroll down to see how you can apply!
At I/O this year, we held two ML Developers Meetups (America/APAC and EMEA/APAC). Merve Noyan/Yusuf Sarıgöz (Turkey), Sayak Paul/Bhavesh Bhatt (India), Leigh Johnson/Margaret Maynard-Reid (USA), David Cardozo (Columbia), Vinicius Caridá/Arnaldo Gualberto (Brazil) shared their experiences in developing ML products with TensorFlow, Cloud AI or JAX and also introduced projects they are currently working on.
After I/O, many ML GDEs posted recap summaries of the I/O on their blogs. Chansung Park (Korea) outlined the ML keynote summary, while US-based Victor Dibia wrapped up the Top 10 Machine Learning and Design Insights from Google IO 2021.
Vertex AI was the topic of conversation at the event. Minori Matsuda from Japan wrote a Japanese article titled “Introduction of powerful Vertex AI AutoML Forecasting.” Similarly, Piero Esposito (Brazil) posted an article titled “Serverless Machine Learning Pipelines with Vertex AI: An Introduction,” including a tutorial on fully customized code. India-based Sayak Paul co-authored a blog post discussing key pieces in Vertex AI right after the Vertex AI announcement showing how to run a TensorFlow training job using Vertex AI.
Communities such as Google Developers Groups (GDG) and TensorFlow User Groups (TFUG) held extended events where speakers further discussed different ML topics from I/O, including China-based Song Lin’s presentation on TensorFlow highlights and Applications experiences from I/O which had 24,000 online attendees. Chansung Park (Korea) also gave a presentation on what Vertex AI is and what you can do with Vertex AI.
Leigh Johnson (USA) wrote an article titled Soft-launching an AI/ML Product as a Solo Founder, covering GCP AutoML Vision, GCP IoT Core, TensorFlow Model Garden, and TensorFlow.js. The article details the journey of a solo founder developing an ML product for detecting printing failure for 3D printers (more on this story is coming up soon, so stay tuned!)
Demo and code examples from Victor Dibia (USA)’s New York Taxi project, Minori Matsuda (Japan)’s article on AutoML and AI Platform notebook, Srivatsan Srinivasan (USA)’s video tutorials, Sayak Paul (India)’s Distributed Training in TensorFlow with AI Platform & Docker and Chansung Park (Korea)’s curated personal newsletter were all published together on Cloud blog.
Aqsa Kausar (Pakistan) gave a talk about Explainable AI in Google Cloud at the International Women’s Day Philippines event. She explained why it is important and where and how it is applied in ML workflows.
Finally, ML Lab by Robert John from Nigeria, introduces the ML landscape on GCP covering from BigQueryML through AutoML to TensorFlow and AI Platform.
Eliyar Eziz (China) published a book “TensorFlow 2 with real-life use cases”. Gant Laborde from the US authored book “Learning TensorFlow.js” which is published by O'Reilly and wrote an article “No Data No Problem - TensorFlow.js Transfer Learning” about seeking out new datasets to boldly train where no models have trained before. He also published “A Riddikulus Dataset” which talks about creating the Harry Potter dataset.
Hong Kong-based Guan Wang published a research paper, “Iterated Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks for Word Segmentation,” covering state-of-the-art performance improvement, which is implemented on TensorFlow by Keras.
Elyes Manai from Tunisia wrote an article “Become a Tensorflow Certified Developer ” - a guide to TensorFlow Certificate and tips.
Greece-based George Soloupis wrote a tutorial “Fine-tune a BERT model with the use of Colab TPU” on how to finetune a BERT model that was trained specifically on greek language to perform the downstream task of text classification, using Colab’s TPU (v2–8).
India-based Aakash Nain has published the TF-JAX tutorial series (Part1, Part2, Part3, Part 4), aiming to teach everyone the building blocks of TensorFlow and JAX frameworks.
Online Meetup TensorFlow and JAX by Tzer-jen Wei from Taiwan covered JAX intro and use cases. It also touched upon different ways of writing TensorFlow models and training loops.
YouTube video Neural Networks, with a practical example written in JAX, probably the first JAX techtalk in Portuguese by João Guilherme Madeia Araújo (Brazil).
A lot of Keras examples were contributed by Sayak Paul from India and listed below are some of these examples.
Notebook “Simple Bayesian Ridge with Sentence Embeddings” by Ertuğrul Demir (Turkey) about a natural language processing task using BERT finetuning followed by simple linear regression on top of sentence embeddings generated by transformers.
Youhan Lee from Korea gave a talk about “Learning machine learning and TensorFlow with Kaggle competition”. He explained how to use the Kaggle platform for learning ML.
Advances in machine learning and deep learning research are changing our technology, and many ML GDEs are interested and contributing.
Karim Beguir (UK) co-authored a paper with the DeepMind team covering a novel compositional approach using Deep Reinforcement Learning to solve robotics manipulation tasks. The paper was accepted in the NeurIPS workshop.
Finally, Sayak Paul from India, together with Pin-Yu Chen, published a research paper, “Vision Transformers are Robust Learners,” covering the robustness of the Vision Transformer (ViT) against common corruptions and perturbations, distribution shifts, and natural adversarial examples.
If you want to know more about the Google Experts community and their global open-source ML contributions, please check the GDE Program website, visit the GDE Directory and connect with GDEs on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can also meet them virtually on the ML GDE’s YouTube Channel!
Posted by The Coral Team
We're always excited to share updates to our Coral platform for building edge ML applications. In this post, we have some interesting demos, interfaces, and tutorials to share, and we'll start by pointing you to an important software update for the Coral Dev Board.
If you have a Coral Dev Board or Coral SoM, please install our latest Mendel update as soon as possible to receive a critical fix to part of the SoC power configuration. To get it, just log onto your board and install the update as follows:
This will install a patch from NXP for the Dev Board / SoM's SoC, without which it's possible the SoC will overstress and the lifetime of the device could be reduced. If you recently flashed your board with the latest system image, you might already have this fix (we also updated the flashable image today), but it never hurts to fetch all updates, as shown above.
We recently published the Coral Manufacturing Demo, which demonstrates how to use a single Coral Edge TPU to simultaneously accomplish two common manufacturing use-cases: worker safety and visual inspection.
The demo is designed for two specific videos and tasks (worker keepout detection and apple quality grading) but it is designed to be easily customized with different inputs and tasks. The demo, written in C++, requires OpenGL and is primarily targeted at x86 systems which are prevalent in manufacturing gateways – although ARM Cortex-A systems, like the Coral Dev Board, are also supported.
We've been working hard to make ML acceleration with the Coral Edge TPU available for most popular systems. So we're proud to announce support for WebUSB, allowing you to use the Coral USB Accelerator directly from Chrome. To get started, check out our WebCoral demo, which builds a webpage where you can select a model and run an inference accelerated by the Edge TPU.
We recently released a new models repository that makes it easier to explore the various trained models available for the Coral platform, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, pose estimation, and speech recognition. Each family page lists the various models, including details about training dataset, input size, latency, accuracy, model size, and other parameters, making it easier to select the best fit for the application at hand. Lastly, each family page includes links to training scripts and example code to help you get started. Or for an overview of all our models, you can see them all on one page.
Even with our collection of pre-trained models, it can sometimes be tricky to create a task-specific model that's compatible with our Edge TPU accelerator. To make this easier, we've released some new Google Colab tutorials that allow you to perform transfer learning for object detection, using MobileDet and EfficientDet-Lite models. You can find these and other Colabs in our GitHub Tutorials repo.
We are excited to share all that Coral has to offer as we continue to evolve our platform. Keep an eye out for more software and platform related news coming this summer. To discover more about our edge ML platform, please visit Coral.ai and share your feedback at coral-support@google.com.
Posted by HyeJung Lee and MJ You, Google ML Ecosystem Community Managers. Reviewed by Soonson Kwon, Developer Relations Program Manager.
Google Developers Experts is a community of passionate developers who love to share their knowledge with others. Many of them specialize in Machine Learning (ML). Despite many unexpected changes over the last months and reduced opportunities for various in person activities during the ongoing pandemic, their enthusiasm did not stop.
Here are some highlights of the ML GDE’s hard work during the Q1 2021 which contributed to the global ML ecosystem.
ML GDE YouTube channel
With the initiative and lead of US-based GDE Margaret Maynard-Reid, we launched the ML GDEs YouTube channel. It is a great way for GDEs to reach global audiences, collaborate as a community, create unique content and promote each other's work. It will contain all kinds of ML related topics: talks on technical topics, tutorials, interviews with another (ML) GDE, a Googler or anyone in the ML community etc. Many videos have already been uploaded, including: ML GDE’s intro from all over the world, tips for TensorFlow & GCP Certification and how to use Google Cloud Platform etc. Subscribe to the channel now!!
TensorFlow Everywhere
17 ML GDEs presented at TensorFlow Everywhere (a global community-led event series for TensorFlow and Machine Learning enthusiasts and developers around the world) hosted by local TensorFlow user groups. You can watch the recorded sessions in the TensorFlow Everywhere playlist on the ML GDE Youtube channel. Most of the sessions cover new features in Tensorflow.
International Women’s Day
Many ML GDEs participated in activities to celebrate International Women’s Day (March 8th). GDE Ruqiya Bin Safi (based in Saudi Arabia) cooperated with WTM Saudi Arabia to organize “Socialthon” - social development hackathons and gave a talk “Successful Experiences in Social Development", which reached 77K viervers live and hit 10K replays. India-based GDE Charmi Chokshi participated in GirlScript's International Women's Day event and gave a talk: “Women In Tech and How we can help the underrepresented in the challenging world”. If you’re looking for more inspiring materials, check out the “Women in AI” playlist on our ML GDE YouTube channel!
Mentoring
ML GDEs are also very active in mentoring community developers, students in the Google Developer Student Clubs and startups in the Google for Startups Accelerator program. Among many, GDE Arnaldo Gualberto (Brazil) conducted mentorship sessions for startups in the Google Fast Track program, discussing how to solve challanges using Machine Learning/Deep Learning with TensorFlow.
TensorFlow
Meanwhile in Europe, GDEs Alexia Audevart (based in France) and Luca Massaron (based in Italy) released “Machine Learning using TensorFlow Cookbook”. It provides simple and effective ideas to successfully use TensorFlow 2.x in computer vision, NLP and tabular data projects. Additionally, Luca published the second edition of the Machine Learning For Dummies book, first published in 2015. Her latest edition is enhanced with product updates and the principal is a larger share of pages devoted to discussion of Deep Learning and TensorFlow / Keras usage.
On top of her women-in-tech related activities, Ruqiya Bin Safi is also running a “Welcome to Deep Learning Course and Orientation” monthly workshop throughout 2021. The course aims to help participants gain foundational knowledge of deep learning algorithms and get practical experience in building neural networks in TensorFlow.
Nepal-based GDE Kshitiz Rimal gave a talk “TensorFlow Project Showcase: Cash Recognition for Visually Impaired" on his project which uses TensorFlow, Google Cloud AutoML and edge computing technologies to create a solution for the visually impaired community in Nepal.
On the other side of the world, in Canada, GDE Tanmay Bakshi presented a talk “Machine Learning-powered Pipelines to Augment Human Specialists” during TensorFlow Everywhere NA. It covered the world of NLP through Deep Learning, how it's historically been done, the Transformer revolution, and how using the TensorFlow & Keras to implement use cases ranging from small-scale name generation to large-scale Amazon review quality ranking.
Google Cloud Platform
We have been equally busy on the GCP side as well. In the US, GDE Srivatsan Srinivasan created a series of videos called “Artificial Intelligence on Google Cloud Platform”, with one of the episodes, "Google Cloud Products and Professional Machine Learning Engineer Certification Deep Dive", getting over 3,000 views.
Korean GDE Chansung Park contributed to TensorFlow User Group Korea with his “Machine Learning Pipeline (CI/CD for ML Products in GCP)” analysis, focused on about machine learning pipeline in Google Cloud Platform.
Last but not least, GDE Gad Benram based in Israel wrote an article on “Seven Tips for Forecasting Cloud Costs”, where he explains how to build and deploy ML models for time series forecasting with Google Cloud Run. It is linked with his solution of building a cloud-spend control system that helps users more-easily analyze their cloud costs.
If you want to know more about the Google Experts community and all their global open-source ML contributions, visit the GDE Directory and connect with GDEs on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can also meet them virtually on the ML GDE’s YouTube Channel!
Posted by Google Creative Lab
“Bad Guy” by Billie Eilish is one of the most-covered songs on YouTube, inspiring thousands of fans to upload their own versions. To celebrate all these covers, YouTube and Google Creative Lab built an AI experiment to combine all of them seamlessly in the world’s first infinite music video: Infinite Bad Guy. The experience aligns every cover to the same beat, no matter its genre, language, or instrumentation.
How do you find “Bad Guy” covers amidst all the billions of videos on YouTube? Just searching for “Bad Guy” would result in false positives, like videos of Billie being interviewed about the song, or miss covers that didn’t use the song name in their titles. YouTube’s ContentID system allows us to find videos that match the musical composition “Bad Guy” and also allows us to narrow our search to videos that appear to be performances or creative interpretations of the song. That way, we can also avoid videos where “Bad Guy” was just background music. We continue to run this search daily, collecting an ever-expanding list of potential covers to use in the experience.
A key part of the experience is being able to jump from cover to cover seamlessly. But fan covers of “Bad Guy” vary widely. Some might be similar to the original, like a dance video set to Billie’s track. Some might vary more in tempo and instrumentation, like a heavy metal cover. And others might diverge greatly from the original, like a clarinet version with no lyrics. How can you get all these covers on the same beat? After trying several approaches like dynamic time warping and chord recognition, we’ve found the most success with a recurrent neural network trained to recognize sections and beats of “Bad Guy.” We collaborated with our friends at IYOYO on cover alignment and they have a great writeup about the process.
Finding and aligning the covers is a fascinating research problem, but the crucial final step is making them explorable to everyone. We’ve tried to make it intuitive and fun to navigate all the infinite combinations, while keeping latency low so the song never drops a beat.
The experience centers around three YouTube players, a number we settled on after a lot of experimentation. Initially we thought more players would be more interesting, but the experience got chaotic and slow. Around the players we’ve added discoverable features like the hashtag drawer and stats page. Video game interfaces have been a big inspiration for us, as they combine multiple interactions in a single dashboard. We’ve also added an autoplay mode for users who want to just sit back and be taken through an ever-changing mix of covers.
We’re excited about how Infinite Bad Guy showcases the incredibly diverse talent of YouTube and the potential machine learning can have for music and creativity. Give it a try and see what beautiful, strange, and brilliant covers you can find.
Posted by Jennifer Kohl, Global Program Manager, Google Developer Groups
Irem presenting at a Google Developer Group event
We recently caught up with Irem Komurcu, a TensorFlow developer and researcher at Istanbul Technical University in Turkey. Irem has been a long-serving member of Google Developer Groups (GDG) Düzce and also serves as a Women Techmakers (WTM) ambassador. Her work with TensorFlow has received several accolades, including being named a Hamdi Ulukaya Girişimi fellow. As one one of twenty-four young entrepreneurs selected, she was flown to New York City last year to learn more about business and receive professional development.
With all this experience to share, we wanted you to hear how she approaches pursuing a career in tech, hones her TensorFlow skills with the GDG community, and thinks about how upcoming programmers can best position themselves for success. Check out the full interview below for more.
I first became interested in tech when I was in high school and went on to study computer engineering. At university, I had an eye-opening experience when I traveled from Turkey to the Google Developer Day event in India. It was here where I observed various code languages, products, and projects that were new to me.
In particular, I saw TensorFlow in action for the first time. Watching the powerful machine learning tool truly sparked my interest in deep learning and project development.
I have studied many different aspects of Tensorflow and ML. My first work was on voice recognition and deep learning. However, I am now working as a computer vision researcher conducting various segmentation, object detection, and classification processes with Tensorflow. In my free time, I write various articles about best practices and strategies to leverage TensorFlow in ML.
I kicked off my studies on deep learning on tensorflow.org. It’s a basic first step, but a powerful one. There were so many blogs, codes, examples, and tutorials for me to dive into. Both the Google Developer Group and TensorFlow communities also offered chances to bounce questions and ideas off other developers as I learned.
Between these technical resources and the person-to-person support, I was lucky to start working with the GDG community while also taking the first steps of my career. There were so many opportunities to meet people and grow all around.
I love being in a large community with technology-oriented people. GDG is a network of professionals who support each other, and that enables people to develop. I am continuously sharing my knowledge with other programmers as they simultaneously mentor me. The chance for us to collaborate together is truly fulfilling.
The number of women supported in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is low in Turkey. To address this, I partner with Women Techmakers (WTM) to give educational talks on TensorFlow and machine learning to women who want to learn how to code in my country. So many women are interested in ML, but just need a friendly, familiar face to help them get started. With WTM, I’ve already given over 30 talks to women in STEM.
Keep researching new things. Read everything you can get your eyes on. Technology has been developing rapidly, and it is necessary to make sure your mind can keep up with the pace. That’s why I recommend communities like GDG that help make sure you’re up to date on the newest trends and learnings.
Want to work with other developers like Irem? Then find the right Google Developer Developer Group for you, here.
Since we launched Coral back in March 2019, we’ve added a number of new product form factors to accommodate the many ways users are adding on-device ML to their products. We've also streamlined the ML workflow and added capabilities like model pipelining with multiple Edge TPUs for an easier and more robust developer experience. And from this, we’ve helped enable amazing use cases from smart water meters that prevent water loss with Olea Edge, to systems for improving harvest yield with Farmwave, to noise cancellation in meetings in Google’s own Series One meeting kits.
This week, we’ll begin shipping the Coral Accelerator Module, a multi-chip module that combines the Edge TPU and it’s power circuitry into a solderable package. The module exposes PCIe and USB2 interfaces, which make it even easier to integrate Coral into custom designs. Several companies are already taking advantage of the compact size and capabilities with their new products coming to market. Read more about how Gumstix, STD, Siana Systems and IEI are using our module.
And in December, we’ll begin shipping the Dev Board Mini, a smaller, more power-efficient, and value-oriented board that brings forward a more traditional, flattened single-board computer design. The Dev Board Mini pairs a Mediatek 8167 SoC with the Coral Accelerator Module over USB 2 and is a great way to evaluate the module as the center of a project or deployment.
You can see the new Dev Board Mini and Accelerator Module in action in the latest episode of Level Up, where Markku Lepisto controls his studio lights with speech commands.
To get updates on when the board will be available for purchase and other Coral news, sign up for our newsletter.
We recently announced a new version of the Coral ML APIs and tools. This release brings the C++ API into parity with Python and makes it more modular, reusable and performant. At the same time it eliminates unnecessary abstractions and surfaces replacing them with native TensorFlow Lite APIs. This release also graduates the Model Pipelining API out of beta and introduces a new model partitioner that automatically partitions models based on profiling and up to 10x better performance.
We’ve added a pre-trained version of MobileDet — a state-of-the-art object detection model for mobile systems — into our models portfolio. We’re migrating our model-development workflow to TensorFlow 2, and we’re including a handful of updated or new models based on the TF2 Keras framework. For details, check out the full announcement on the TensorFlow blog.
We’re also excited to see great developer tools coming from our ecosystem partners. For example, PerceptiLabs offers a visual API for building TensorFlow models and recently published a new demo which trains a machine learning model to identify sign language optimized for the edge with Coral.
The MRQ design from SigFox enables prototyping at the edge for low bandwidth IoT solutions with Coral
And SigFox released a radio transceiver board that stacks on either the Coral Dev Board or Dev Board Mini. This allows small data payloads to be transmitted across low power, long range radio networks for use cases like smart cities, fleet management, asset tracking, agriculture and energy. The PCB design will be offered as a free download on SigFox’s website. Google Cloud Solutions Architect Markku Lepisto will present the new design today, in the opening keynote at SigFox Connect.
The tool, from Farmwave, includes custom-developed ML models, a harvester-mounted box with cameras, an in-cab display, and on- device AI acceleration from Coral.
Just in time for harvest we wanted to share a story about how Farmwave is using Coral to improve the efficiency of farm equipment and reduce food waste. Traditional yield loss analysis involves hand-counting grains of corn left on the ground mid harvest. It’s a time and labor intensive task, and not feasible for farmers who measure the value of their half-million-dollar combines in minutes spent running them.
By leveraging Coral’s on-device AI capabilities, Farmwave was able to build a system that automates the count while the machine is running. Thus allowing farmers to make real-time adjustments to harvesting machines in response to conditions in the field, which can make a big difference in yield.
Kura Sushi designed their intelligent QA system using a Raspberry Pi paired with the Coral USB Accelerator
Kura Revolving Sushi Bar in Japan has always been committed to the highest standards of health and safety for its customers. Known for their tech forward approach, Kura has dabbled in sushi making robots, an automated prize machine called Bikkura-pon, and a patented dome-shaped dish cover, aptly dubbed Mr. Fresh. But most recently, Kura has used Coral to develop an AI powered system that not only facilitates efficiency for better customer experiences, but also enables better tracking to prevent foodborne illnesses.
While this year has presented the world with many obstacles, we’ve been impressed by the new ideas and innovations coming forward through technology. By providing the necessary tools and technology for edge AI, we strive to empower society to create affordable, adaptable, and intelligent systems.
We are excited to share all that Coral has to offer as we evolve our platform. For a list of worldwide distributors, system integrators and partners, visit the Coral partnerships page.
Please visit Coral.ai to discover more about our edge ML platform and share your feedback at coral-support@google.com. To receive future Coral updates directly in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.
Posted by Jennifer Kohl, Program Manager, Developer Community Programs
On October 16-18, thousands of developers from all over the world are coming together for DevFest 2020, the largest virtual weekend of community-led learning on Google technologies.
As people around the world continue to adapt to spending more time at home, developers yearn for community now more than ever. In years past, DevFest was a series of in-person events over a season. For 2020, the community is coming together in a whole new way – virtually – over one weekend to keep developers connected when they may want it the most.
The magic of DevFest comes from the people who organize and speak at the events - developers with various backgrounds and skill levels, all with their own unique perspectives. In different parts of the world, you can find a DevFest session in many local languages. DevFest speakers are made up of various types of technologists, including kid developers , self-taught programmers from rural areas , and CEOs and CTOs of startups. DevFest also features a wide range of speakers from Google, Women Techmakers, Google Developer Experts, and more. Together, these friendly faces, with many different perspectives, create a unique and rich developer conference.
Hosted by Google Developer Groups, this year’s sessions include technical talks and workshops from the community, and a keynote from Google Developers. Through these events, developers will learn how Google technologies help them develop, learn, and build together.
Sessions will cover multiple technologies, such as Android, Google Cloud Platform, Machine Learning with TensorFlow, Web.dev, Firebase, Google Assistant, and Flutter.
For this reason, Google Developers supports the community-led efforts of Google Developer Groups and their annual tentpole event, DevFest. Google provides esteemed speakers from the company and custom technical content produced by developers at Google. The impact of DevFest is really driven by the grassroots, passionate GDG community organizers who volunteer their time. Google Developers is proud to support them.
During DevFest 2019, 138,000+ developers participated across 500+ DevFests in 100 countries. While 2020 is a very different year for events around the world, GDG chapters are galvanizing their communities to come together virtually for this global moment. The excitement for DevFest continues as more people seek new opportunities to meet and collaborate with like-minded, community-oriented developers in our local towns and regions.
Join the conversation on social media with #DevFest.
Sign up for DevFest at goo.gle/devfest.
Still curious? Check out these popular talks from DevFest 2019 events around the world...
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
How to add Flutter to your app
The Flutter journey: production app
Getting started with microcontrollers
Chet Haase and Romaine Guy: quality
Building the ultimate Beatles app
Moving into the fall, the Coral platform continues to grow with the release of the M.2 Accelerator with Dual Edge TPU. Its first application is in Google’s Series One room kits where it helps to remove interruptions and makes the audio clearer for better video meetings. To help even more folks build products with Coral intelligence, we’re dropping the prices on several of our products. And for those folks that are looking to level up their at home video production, we’re sharing a demo of a pose based AI director to make multi-camera video easier to make.
Coral M.2 Accelerator with Dual Edge TPU
The newest addition to our product family brings two Edge TPU co-processors to systems in an M.2 E-key form factor. While the design requires a dual bus PCIe M.2 slot, it brings enhanced ML performance (8 TOPS) to tasks such as running two models in parallel or pipelining one large model across both Edge TPUs.
The ability to scale across multiple edge accelerators isn’t limited to only two Edge TPUs. As edge computing expands to local data centers, cell towers, and gateways, multi-Edge TPU configurations will be required to help process increasingly sophisticated ML models. Coral allows the use of a single toolchain to create models for one or more Edge TPUs that can address many different future configurations.
A great example of how the Coral M.2 Accelerator with Dual Edge TPU is being used is in the Series One meeting room kits for Google Meet.
The new Series One room kits for Google Meet run smarter with Coral intelligence
Google’s new Series One room kits use our Coral M.2 Accelerator with Dual Edge TPU to bring enhanced audio clarity to video meetings. TrueVoice®, a multi-channel noise cancellation technology, minimizes distractions to ensure every voice is heard with up to 44 channels of echo and noise cancellation, making distracting sounds like snacking or typing on a keyboard a concern of the past.
Enabling the clearest possible communication in challenging environments was the target for the Google Meet hardware team. The consideration of what makes a challenging environment was not limited to unusually noisy environments, such as lunchrooms doubling as conference rooms. Any conference room can present challenging acoustics that make it difficult for all participants to be heard.
The secret to clarity without expensive and cumbersome equipment is to use virtual audio channels and AI driven sound isolation. Read more about how Coral was used to enhance and future-proof the innovative design.
Expanding the AI edge
Earlier this year, we reduced the prices of our prototyping devices and sensors. We are excited to share further price drops on more of our products. Our System-on-Module is now available for $99.99, and our Mini PCIe Accelerator, M.2 Accelerator A+E Key, and M.2 Accelerator B+M key are now available at $24.99. We hope this lower price will make our edge AI more accessible to more creative minds around the world. Later, this month our SoM offering will also expand to include 2 and 4GB RAM options.
Multi-cam with AI
As we expand our platform and product family, we continue to keep new edge AI use cases in mind. We are continually inspired by our developer community’s experimentation and implementations. When recently faced with the challenges of multicam video production from home, Markku Lepistö, Solutions Architect at Google Cloud, created this real-time pose-based multicam tool he so aptly dubbed, AI Director.
We love seeing such unique implementations of on-device ML and invite you to share your own projects and feedback at coral-support@google.com.
For a list of worldwide distributors, system integrators and partners, visit the Coral partnerships page. Please visit Coral.ai to discover more about our edge ML platform.
Posted by the Coral Team
Summer has arrived along with a number of Coral updates. We're happy to announce a new partnership with balena that helps customers build, manage, and deploy IoT applications at scale on Coral devices. In addition, we've released a series of updates to expand platform compatibility, make development easier, and improve the ML capabilities of our devices.
First up, our Edge TPU runtime is now open-source and available on GitHub, including scripts and instructions for building the library for Linux and Windows. Customers running a platform that is not officially supported by Coral, including ARMv7 and RISC-V can now compile the Edge TPU runtime themselves and start experimenting. An open source runtime is easier to integrate into your customized build pipeline, enabling support for creating Yocto-based images as well as other distributions.
Coral customers can now also use the Mini PCIe and M.2 accelerators on the Microsoft Windows platform. New Windows drivers for these products complement the previously released Windows drivers for the USB accelerator and make it possible to start prototyping with the Coral USB Accelerator on Windows and then to move into production with our Mini PCIe and M.2 products.
We’ve also made a number of new updates to our ML tools:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install edgetpu
We are excited to share that the Balena fleet management platform now supports Coral products!
Companies running a fleet of ML-enabled devices on the edge need to keep their systems up-to-date with the latest security patches in order to protect data, model IP and hardware from being compromised. Additionally, ML applications benefit from being consistently retrained to recognize new use cases with maximum accuracy. Coral + balena together, bring simplicity and ease to the provisioning, deployment, updating, and monitoring of your ML project at the edge, moving early prototyping seamlessly towards production environments with many thousands of devices.
Read more about all the benefits of Coral devices combined with balena container technology or get started deploying container images to your Coral fleet with this demo project.
Mendel Linux (5.0 release Eagle) is now available for the Coral Dev Board and SoM and includes a more stable package repository that provides a smoother updating experience. It also brings compatibility improvements and a new version of the GPU driver.
Last but not least, we’ve recently released BodyPix, a Google person-segmentation model that was previously only available for TensorFlow.JS, as a Coral model. This enables real-time privacy preserving understanding of where people (and body parts) are on a camera frame. We first demoed this at CES 2020 and it was one of our most popular demos. Using BodyPix we can remove people from the frame, display only their outline, and aggregate over time to see heat maps of population flow.
Here are two possible applications of BodyPix: Body-part segmentation and anonymous population flow. Both are running on the Dev Board.
We’re excited to add BodyPix to the portfolio of projects the community is using to extend our models far beyond our demos—including tackling today’s biggest challenges. For example, Neuralet has taken our MobileNet V2 SSD Detection model and used it to implement Smart Social Distancing. Using the bounding box of person detection, they can compute a region for safe distancing and let a user know if social distance isn’t being maintained. The best part is this is done without any sort of facial recognition or tracking, with Coral we can accomplish this in real-time in a privacy preserving manner.
We can’t wait to see more projects that the community can make with BodyPix. Beyond anonymous population flow there’s endless possibilities with background and body part manipulation. Let us know what you come up with at our community channels, including GitHub and StackOverflow.
We are excited to share all that Coral has to offer as we continue to evolve our platform. For a list of worldwide distributors, system integrators and partners, including balena, visit the Coral partnerships page. Please visit Coral.ai to discover more about our edge ML platform and share your feedback at coral-support@google.com.
