Beyond the buzz of artificial intelligence, there are compelling reasons to include AI tools in your engineering projects.
Artificial intelligence brings up mental images of sentient robots at war with mankind and man’s struggle to avoid the endangered species list. Here are the reasons why you may want to include machine learning in your next project.
Reason #1 — Marketing Buzz
From an engineering perspective, including a technology or methodology in a design simply because it has marketing buzz is something that every engineer should fight. The fact though is that if there is a buzz around something, odds are it will in the end help to sell the product better. Technology marketing seems to come in cycles, but there are always underlying themes that are driving those cycles that at the end of the day do turn out to be real.
Reason #2 — The Hardware Can Support It
It’s truly amazing how much microcontroller and application processors have changed in just the last few years. Microcontrollers which I have always considered to be resource constrained devices are now supporting megabytes of flash and RAM, having on-board cache and reaching system clock rates of 1 GHz and beyond! These “little” controllers are now even supporting DSP instructions which means that they can efficiently execute inferences.
Reason #3 — It May Simplify Development
Machine learning has risen on the “buzz” charts for a reason. It has become a nearly indispensable tool for the IoT and the cloud. Machine learning can dramatically simplify software development. For example, have you ever tried to code up an application that can recognize gestures, handwriting or classify objects? These are really simple problems for a human brain to solve, but extremely difficult to write a program for. In certain program domains such as voice recognition, image classification and predictive maintenance, machine learning can dramatically simplify the development process and speed-up development.
Reason #4 — To Expand Your Solution Toolbox
One aspect of engineering that I absolutely love is that the tools and technologies that we use to solve problems and development products is always changing. Just look at how you developed an embedded one, three and five years ago! While some of your approaches have undoubtedly stayed constant, there should have been considerable improvements and additions to your processes that have improved your efficiency and the way that you solve problems.
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