Microsoft Reactor

Jim left the UK a few years ago to move to the Pacific North West of the US. Back in the UK the scariest animal he might have encountered would be a sudden hedgehog, but in Washington State where he lives it seems there are bears! He even lost an apple tree and a fence to one once.

A useful tool for him would be a bear detector – a device to alert him if there are bears in the garden. Such a tool could be built using an AI model trained in the cloud and running on a powerful computer. But who wants to risk a powerful computer outside when there are bears?

What if he could run a bear detector on a relatively inexpensive microcontroller, then see the results on a cloud dashboard?
This is where TinyML comes in! TinyML is shrinking AI models down very small, as in kilobytes in size, then running them on low power microcontrollers, or tiny computers like a Raspberry Pi Zero.

In this session Jim will train a bear detector using Edge Impulse, an on-line development platform for TinyML models, taking advantage of their new FOMO object detection model. He’ll then show how to run this model on a low powered device, uploading the detection results to an Azure IoT Central dashboard.

By the end of this session, you will have an understanding of TinyML, how to train models, how to visualize data, and just how wary of bears Jim actually is.

Useful Event Resources:
​https://julyot.dev

Speaker:
Jim Bennett, Regional Cloud Advocate, Microsoft
Jim is a Regional Cloud Advocate focusing on building out and skilling communities in the Pacific North West, with a focus on the Microsoft Reactor in Redmond, Washington. He’s British, so sounds way smarter than he actually is, and is happy he moved to Redmond in time to be locked down at home and not see the office he came to work in, or the places he wanted to visit. In the past he’s lived in 4 continents working as a developer in the mobile, desktop, and scientific space. He's spoken at conferences and events all around the globe, organized meetup groups and communities, and written a book on mobile development.