Datasheets for Machine Learning Sensors

Machine learning (ML) sensors offer a new paradigm for sensing that enables intelligence at the edge while empowering end-users with greater control of their data. As these ML sensors play a crucial role in the development of intelligent devices, clear documentation of their specifications, functionalities, and limitations is pivotal. This paper introduces a standard datasheet template for ML sensors and discusses its essential components including: the system's hardware, ML model and dataset attributes, end-to-end performance metrics, and environmental impact. We provide an example datasheet for our own ML sensor and discuss each section in detail. We highlight how these datasheets can facilitate better understanding and utilization of sensor data in ML applications, and we provide objective measures upon which system performance can be evaluated and compared. Together, ML sensors and their datasheets provide greater privacy, security, transparency, explainability, auditability, and user-friendliness for ML-enabled embedded systems. We conclude by emphasizing the need for standardization of datasheets across the broader ML community to ensure the responsible and effective use of sensor data.

Is TinyML Sustainable? Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Machine Learning on Microcontrollers

The sustained growth of carbon emissions and global waste elicits significant sustainability concerns for our environment's future. The growing Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to exacerbate this issue. However, an emerging area known as Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) has the opportunity to help address these environmental challenges through sustainable computing practices. TinyML, the deployment of machine learning (ML) algorithms onto low-cost, low-power microcontroller systems, enables on-device sensor analytics that unlocks numerous always-on ML applications. This article discusses the potential of these TinyML applications to address critical sustainability challenges. Moreover, the footprint of this emerging technology is assessed through a complete life cycle analysis of TinyML systems. From this analysis, TinyML presents opportunities to offset its carbon emissions by enabling applications that reduce the emissions of other sectors. Nevertheless, when globally scaled, the carbon footprint of TinyML systems is not negligible, necessitating that designers factor in environmental impact when formulating new devices. Finally, research directions for enabling further opportunities for TinyML to contribute to a sustainable future are outlined.

Machine Learning Sensors

Machine learning sensors represent a paradigm shift for the future of embedded machine learning applications. Current instantiations of embedded machine learning (ML) suffer from complex integration, lack of modularity, and privacy and security concerns from data movement. This article proposes a more data-centric paradigm for embedding sensor intelligence on edge devices to combat these challenges. Our vision for "sensor 2.0" entails segregating sensor input data and ML processing from the wider system at the hardware level and providing a thin interface that mimics traditional sensors in functionality. This separation leads to a modular and easy-to-use ML sensor device. We discuss challenges presented by the standard approach of building ML processing into the software stack of the controlling microprocessor on an embedded system and how the modularity of ML sensors alleviates these problems. ML sensors increase privacy and accuracy while making it easier for system builders to integrate ML into their products as a simple component. We provide examples of prospective ML sensors and an illustrative datasheet as a demonstration and hope that this will build a dialogue to progress us towards sensor 2.0.

CFU Playground: Full-Stack Open-Source Framework for Tiny Machine Learning (tinyML) Acceleration on FPGAs

We present CFU Playground, a full-stack open-source framework that enables rapid and iterative design of machine learning (ML) accelerators for embedded ML systems. Our toolchain tightly integrates open-source software, RTL generators, and FPGA tools for synthesis, place, and route. This full-stack development framework gives engineers access to explore bespoke architectures that are customized and co-optimized for embedded ML. The rapid, deploy-profile-optimization feedback loop lets ML hardware and software developers achieve significant returns out of a relatively small investment in customization. Using CFU Playground's design loop, we show substantial speedups (55x-75x) and design space exploration between the CPU and accelerator.

ML-EXray: Visibility into ML Deployment on the Edge

Benefiting from expanding cloud infrastructure, deep neural networks (DNNs) today have increasingly high performance when trained in the cloud. Researchers spend months of effort competing for an extra few percentage points of model accuracy. However, when these models are actually deployed on edge devices in practice, very often, the performance can abruptly drop over 10% without obvious reasons. The key challenge is that there is not much visibility into ML inference execution on edge devices, and very little awareness of potential issues during the edge deployment process. We present ML-EXray, an end-to-end framework, which provides visibility into layer-level details of the ML execution, and helps developers analyze and debug cloud-to-edge deployment issues. More often than not, the reason for sub-optimal edge performance does not only lie in the model itself, but every operation throughout the data flow and the deployment process. Evaluations show that ML-EXray can effectively catch deployment issues, such as pre-processing bugs, quantization issues, suboptimal kernels, etc. Using ML-EXray, users need to write less than 15 lines of code to fully examine the edge deployment pipeline. Eradicating these issues, ML-EXray can correct model performance by up to 30%, pinpoint error-prone layers, and guide users to optimize kernel execution latency by two orders of magnitude. Code and APIs will be released as an open-source multi-lingual instrumentation library and a Python deployment validation library.

Widening Access to Applied Machine Learning with TinyML

Broadening access to both computational and educational resources is critical to diffusing machine-learning (ML) innovation. However, today, most ML resources and experts are siloed in a few countries and organizations. In this paper, we describe our pedagogical approach to increasing access to applied ML through a massive open online course (MOOC) on Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML). We suggest that TinyML, ML on resource-constrained embedded devices, is an attractive means to widen access because TinyML both leverages low-cost and globally accessible hardware, and encourages the development of complete, self-contained applications, from data collection to deployment. To this end, a collaboration between academia (Harvard University) and industry (Google) produced a four-part MOOC that provides application-oriented instruction on how to develop solutions using TinyML. The series is openly available on the edX MOOC platform, has no prerequisites beyond basic programming, and is designed for learners from a global variety of backgrounds. It introduces pupils to real-world applications, ML algorithms, data-set engineering, and the ethical considerations of these technologies via hands-on programming and deployment of TinyML applications in both the cloud and their own microcontrollers. To facilitate continued learning, community building, and collaboration beyond the courses, we launched a standalone website, a forum, a chat, and an optional course-project competition. We also released the course materials publicly, hoping they will inspire the next generation of ML practitioners and educators and further broaden access to cutting-edge ML technologies.

Few-Shot Keyword Spotting in Any Language

We introduce a few-shot transfer learning method for keyword spotting in any language. Leveraging open speech corpora in nine languages, we automate the extraction of a large multilingual keyword bank and use it to train an embedding model. With just five training examples, we fine-tune the embedding model for keyword spotting and achieve an average F1 score of 0.75 on keyword classification for 180 new keywords unseen by the embedding model in these nine languages. This embedding model also generalizes to new languages. We achieve an average F1 score of 0.65 on 5-shot models for 260 keywords sampled across 13 new languages unseen by the embedding model. We investigate streaming accuracy for our 5-shot models in two contexts: keyword spotting and keyword search. Across 440 keywords in 22 languages, we achieve an average streaming keyword spotting accuracy of 85.2% with a false acceptance rate of 1.2%, and observe promising initial results on keyword search.

Data Engineering for Everyone

Data engineering is one of the fastest-growing fields within machine learning (ML). As ML becomes more common, the appetite for data grows more ravenous. But ML requires more data than individual teams of data engineers can readily produce, which presents a severe challenge to ML deployment at scale. Much like the software-engineering revolution, where mass adoption of open-source software replaced the closed, in-house development model for infrastructure code, there is a growing need to enable rapid development and open contribution to massive machine learning data sets. This article shows that open-source data sets are the rocket fuel for research and innovation at even some of the largest AI organizations. Our analysis of nearly 2000 research publications from Facebook, Google and Microsoft over the past five years shows the widespread use and adoption of open data sets. Open data sets that are easily accessible to the public are vital to accelerating ML innovation for everyone. But such open resources are scarce in the wild. So, what if we are able to accelerate data-set creation via automatic data set generation tools?