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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @01:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @01:30PM (#544157)

    A squirrel is just a rat in a suit.

    ...and you are just a monkey with a keyboard.