Optimising AI performance whilst operating economically at the edge remains the elusive holy grail. For four years, the Edge AI Summit has aided enterprise adopters, OEMs, AI software, and hardware providers in their pursuit of deploying AI at the edge, by helping them form partnerships that will improve the performance of embedded hardware, optimise models, and compress workloads to enable high-performing and low-footprint AI to exist at the edge.

The fourth annual Edge AI Summit unites the technologists from around the world tasked with designing and developing real-world use cases that bring real-time and secure AI to low-power applications from the sensor-edge to device-edge, and to areas that have limited connectivity to the cloud. The Summit will take place 15th-18th November 2021.

The History of the Edge AI Summit

The Edge AI Summit was launched off the back of our AI Hardware Summit when we realised that there were a lot of companies working on increasing computing capabilities on devices and edge nodes to try and push machine learning processing closer to the sources of data.

In the first year the summit was very focused on compute architectures for devices and the ‘extreme edge’ (microprocessors and sensors), but over the years the event has incorporated much more software-focused content. As well as looking at how to improve compute and memory capacity at the edge, we now cover techniques in algorithm development to reduce the size and complexity of ML models, and ingenuities in software and application development, unearthing use cases from a variety of vertical industries.

In essence, the Edge AI Summit is still a technology-focused event rather than an applications-focused event, but we strike a balance between looking at how Edge AI can change the world, and discussing how to actually make it work.

Key Themes for 2021

There are several main themes for the event this year. Firstly, clarifying the benefit and costs of deploying AI on the edge vs on the cloud for end users so that they can make a robust business decision about where to deploy their AI – our keynote speaker Ganesh Harinath, Vice President & CTO of Verizon Media will be speaking on this.

Secondly, helping edge computing, AI hardware and TinyML software vendors understand what challenges their customers - which are generally original equipment manufacturers, device manufacturers and ISVs - have and where their tools may assist in helping to deploy AI at the edge. For this we have members from AI teams from LG Electronics, Ford, a number of start-ups looking to scale, amongst several others speaking about their edge AI use cases.   

Thirdly, helping original equipment manufacturers, ISVs and enterprise users understand which edge computing, AI hardware and TinyML software tools are best to use to ensure AI can be deployed on resource constrained IoT and edge devices. Also, bringing the whole value chain together to talk about overcoming interoperability challenges which often prevent edge AI proof-of-concepts being turned into real-world applications. Some interesting companies of note include, Intel, the innovative neuromorphic computing companies like Brainchip and SynSense, and the edge computing providers who support AI deployed on IoT devices, like Edgeworx, will be speaking about how they work with partners to ensure high performing, economical, secure and trustworthy AI systems at the edge.

To summarise, this conference is for the technologists wanting to form strategic partnerships and establish client relationships and there are still some opportunities still available to be involved presenting at the summit so do reach out to us.

About Virtual

Our virtual event format will bring together the main conference, exhibition area, roundtables, and meetings, to a global virtual audience to consume the same content and network via our AI-powered virtual event platform.

In 2020 we saw that the geographic mix of our audience was much greater, so we expect that this will increase our audience percentage from EMEA and APAC. This alongside the in-person Silicon Valley audience will result in the Edge AI Summit becoming a truly global summit.

View the full agenda, speaker line-up and audience breakdown here.