I was invited to University of Agder, in the South of Norway (in a nice town called Grimstad, famous for the presence of Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun), to present my vision on what kind of hardware do we need for pervasive AI. This presentation was part of a workshop organised by Prof Ole-Christoffer Granmo, Director of CAIR, on the occasion of the grant opening of CAIR – https://cair.uia.no

In my presentation I emphasized the following points:

• Pervasive Intelligence requires reconsidering many balances:
  – Between software and hardware
  – Between power and compute
  – Between analogand digital
  – Between design and fabrication and maintenance
• Granulation phenomenon: Granularity of power, time, data and function
• Main research questions:
  – Can we granulate intelligence to minimum?
  – What is the smallest level at which we can make cyber-systems learn in terms of power, time, data and function?
• Grand challenge for pervasive hardware AI:
  To enable electronic components with an ability to learn and compute in real-life environments with real-power and in real-time
• Research Hypothesis:
  We should design systems that are energy-modulated and self-timed, with maximally distributed learning capabilities

I put a strong hypothesis on the role of using Tsetlin Automata (Automata with Linear Tactics) for building electronics with high-granularity learning capabilities.

The key elements of the proposed approach are:

• Event-driven, robust to power and timing fluctuations
• Decentralised TsetlinAutomata (TAs) for learning on demand
• Mixed digital-analogcompute where elements are enabled and controlled by individual TAs
• Natural approximation in its nature, both in learning and compute
• Asynchronous logic for h/w implementation

The full set of my slides is here: https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/alex.yakovlev/home.formal/talks/AlexYakovlev-AI%20Hardware-070219.version3.pdf