Chipmaker Intel Corp. today teamed up with the online educational course provider Udacity Inc. to launch a new course for developers interested in deploying artificial intelligence models at the network edge.

Edge computing refers to computing processes that are run locally on the device itself, instead of in the cloud. This enables data to be processed much faster, removes the security risk of transferring the data to a cloud-based server and reduces the cost of data transfer, as well as the risks of bandwidth outages disrupting performance.

The goal of the new Intel Edge AI for IoT Developers Nanodegree program is to familiarize developers with Intel’s OpenVINO toolkit, which is a set of tools for deploying pre-trained deep learning models at the edge, using a C++ or Python inference engine application programming interface.

Intel believes this will be an important skillset for developers in the coming years, as industries such as healthcare, manufacturing and retail are increasingly deploying AI at the edge to gather more accurate, real-time insights. It notes that the global edge computing market is expected to grow to $8.96 billion by the end of 2023, according to a forecast from Kenneth Research, but says most developers today are not equipped to meet this demand.

The OpenVINO toolkit is based on convolutional neural networks, and enables developers to maximize application performance across a range of Intel architectures. The course also provides access to Intel’s IoT DevCloud, where students can develop, test and run applications on a variety of Intel chips.

Intel said the course costs $1,077 and will take about three months to complete. It involves completing three real-world projects that will be reviewed and approved by Udacity’s network of reviewers.

“Optimizing direct deployment of models on edge devices requires knowledge of unique constraints like power, network bandwidth and latency, varying compute architectures and more,” said Jonathan Ballon, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Internet of Things Group. “The skills this course delivers will allow developers and the companies that hire them to implement learnings on real-world applications across a variety of fields.”

Image: Kreatikar/Pixabay