Deakin at cutting edge of AI
GEELONG electronics students will be in the box seat to help solve some of the world’s most pressing issues when they become Australia’s first university students to use emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
While industry is adapting to new technologies, such as ‘AI chips’ - like those used in the latest iPhones and smart devices being developed by companies including Amazon - most traditional university electronics courses have been left to play catch up.
But Deakin’s School of Engineering is changing that, incorporating the technology in its project-based courses. It is already enabling students to develop cutting-edge solutions to current and emerging problems.
Masters student Aditya Ravishankar is looking at how AI chips can help a small weather station he has developed to accurately forecast weather for specific locations – such as a farmer’s paddock or a city intersection.
”At the moment a small weather station has sensors to record things like temperature, humidity and rainfall, and sim- ply reports those current values, often as a general figure across a large area,” Mr Ravishankar said.
”What I hope to use the AI chip to do is forecast the weather for a very specific location and then provide smart advice.”
In agriculture that might be advising how much irrigation a particular paddock should receive that day.
In traffic management, certain weather conditions might suggest a lowering of the speed limit.
Mr Ravishankar said such an application would usually need a huge processing system, sharing the information through the cloud and into web-based software.
”But an AI chip would allow this information processing to be self-contained, making it much more portable, quicker, cheaper, and precise, and the data far less likely to be compromised.”
Fellow student Scott Craven is aiming to use the AI processor to help a sumo-robot he built for his final year undergraduate project to learn visual recognition of obstacles, similar technology currently being developed in autonomous vehicles.
”If we can keep developing these AI chips to faster processing speeds, we should be able to get autonomous cars reacting like humans without the whole boot being taken up by a super computer,” Mr Craven said.
An AI chip refers to artificial intelligence built into the hardware of an electronic system.
It is designed to replicate the way neurons work in a human brain.
This enables devices to learn how to accomplish helpful tasks without the need for reprogramming.
Deakin Senior Lecturer in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Dr Hamid Abdi said this helped increase computing speed, reduces the cost and size of smart devices, and improves security as data can be processed in the device, without needing to be sent into the cloud.
”While this technology is still very new, AI chips will quickly become standard issue in smartphones, and soon help power the next generation of Internet of Things devices, drones, smart speakers and self-driving cars,” Dr Abdi said.
”It’s a significant change from the rigidity of traditional computer programming, and we’re giving Deakin students the opportunity to be at the forefront of that.”
The crucial step in allowing students access to this AI hardware is Deakin’s development of a systems board for an AI chip, spearheaded by Dr Abdi and Masters student Rehan Mohammed.
Mr Mohammed said being able to play around with applications for an AI chip while still at university gave him and his classmates an edge over their competitors when it came time to head out into the workforce.
”This really stands out on our CVs,” Mr Mohammed said.
”All engineers know traditional embedded systems, but this is something totally different and totally new. AI is a thousand times more powerful.”
Dr Abdi said he wasn’t aware of any other Australian university that had integrated AI chip technology into their teaching and learning.