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posted by CoolHand on Monday July 24 2017, @02:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the working-towards-skynet dept.

The Raspberry Pi is one of the most exciting developments in hobbyist computing today. Across the world, people are using it to automate beer making, open up the world of robotics and revolutionise STEM education in a world overrun by film students. These are all laudable pursuits. Meanwhile, what is Microsoft doing with it? Creating squirrel-hunting water robots.

Over at the firm's Machine Learning and Optimization group, a researcher saw squirrels stealing flower bulbs and seeds from his bird feeder. The research team trained a computer vision model to detect squirrels, and then put it onto a Raspberry Pi 3 board. Whenever an adventurous rodent happened by, it would turn on the sprinkler system.

Microsoft's sciurine aversions aren't the point of that story – its shoehorning of a convolutional neural network onto an ARM CPU is. It shows how organizations are pushing hardware further to support AI algorithms. As AI continues to make the headlines, researchers are pushing its capabilities to make it increasingly competent at basic tasks such as recognizing vision and speech.

Do you go with the cloud, GPUs, FPGAs, or other?


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @04:42PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @04:42PM (#543756)

    Stupid/soft-hearted neighbor feeds the deer in the winter. The herd back in the adjacent undeveloped area is at least a dozen, have seen that many at one time moving as a pack.

    In the summer they feed on gardens & plantings. All that is needed is a deterrent, so that the deer eat other gardens, not mine...

    In the fall they eat most of the apples that fall in the yard, which is useful because the apples are an old variety, not very tasty to humans.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 24 2017, @05:09PM (1 child)

    You need a rifle and a big freezer not a deterrent.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @07:06PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @07:06PM (#543838)

      Ummm, no. No firearms. I did mention that there are neighbors. The only shooting that happens around here is cops and robbers (and photography). The cops sometimes practice on deer, using the euphemism, "bait and shoot".