AI at the Edge

Chapter 5. Tools and Expertise

The edge AI development workflow includes many highly technical tasks, and most projects will require skills and expertise pooled by a team of experts.

The first section of this chapter is a guide to building the team that will turn your ideas into reality. Even if you’re still at an early stage, it’s helpful to understand the types of skills that will be important and the challenges you can expect to encounter. AI is all about automating human insights, so it’s vital that you have the right insights on your team.

The second part of the chapter, starting with “Tools of the Trade”, is designed to help get you to grips with the key technical tools for working with edge AI. If you’re still early in your product development journey, you may want to skim over some of the details—and then use this chapter as a reference once you’ve come up with some concrete ideas and are ready to start.

Building a Team for AI at the Edge

Edge AI is a truly complete technology. As a topic, it makes use of knowledge from everything from the physical properties of semiconductor electronics all the way up to the engineering of high-level architectures that span devices and the cloud. It demands expertise in the most cutting-edge approaches to artificial intelligence and machine learning along with the most venerable skills of bare-metal embedded software engineering. It makes use of the entire history of computer science and electrical engineering, laid out end to end.