How to Organize a Zoom Wedding

Photo by Chantal Joanne and I got engaged two years ago in Paris, and were planning on getting married in the summer, before the pandemic intervened. Once it became clear that it might be years until everybody could meet up in person, especially older members of our families who were overseas, we started looking into how we could have our ceremony...

Aug 2020

The Five: Putting Jack the Ripper’s Victims at the Center of the Story

Years ago I went on a “Jack the Ripper” walking tour when I visited London without giving it much thought. The murders felt like fiction, in the same realm as Sherlock Holmes or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Even visiting the spots where the bodies were found didn’t make an impact. I’ve never been a “Ripperologist” but as someone interested in Victorian history...

May 2020

Quantization Screencast

TinyML Book Screencast #4 – Quantization For the past few months I’ve been working with Zain Asgar and Keyi Zhang on EE292D, Machine Learning on Embedded Systems, at Stanford. We’re hoping to open source all the materials after the course is done, but I’ve been including some of the lectures I’m leading as part of my TinyML YouTube series. Since I’ve talked a lot about...

May 2020

Converting a TensorFlow Lite .cc data array into a file on disk

Most of the devices TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers runs on don’t have file systems, so the model data is typically included by compiling a source file containing an array of bytes into the executable. I recently added a utility to help convert files into nicely-formatted source files and headers, as the convert_bytes_to_c_source() function, but...

Feb 2020

TinyML Book Released!

I’ve been excited about running machine learning on microcontrollers ever since I joined Google and discovered the amazing work that the speech wakeword team were doing with 13 kilobyte models, and so I’m very pleased to finally be able to share a new O’Reilly book that shows you how to build your own TinyML applications. It took me and my colleague...

Jan 2020

Why you must see Richard Mosse’s Incoming

Image by Richard Mosse When I went to SF MoMA over the holiday break I didn’t have a plan for what I wanted to see, but as soon as I saw the first photos of Richard Mosse’s Incoming exhibition I knew where I’d be spending most of my time. His work documents the European refugee crisis in a way I’ve never seen before. The innovation is that he’s using...

Jan 2020

Chesterton’s shell script

Photo by Linnaea Mallette I have a few days off over the holidays, so I’ve had a chance to think about what I’ve learned over the last year. Funnily enough, the engineering task that taught me the most was writing and maintaining a shell script of less than two hundred lines. One of my favorite things about programming is how seemingly simple problems...

Jan 2020

Can we avoid the Internet of Trash?

Photo by Branden When embedded systems get cheap and capable enough to run machine learning, I’m convinced we’re going to end up with trillions of devices doing useful jobs in the world around us. Those benefits are only half the story though, so I’ve been doing my best to think through what the unintended consequences of a change this big might be....

Aug 2019

How can we stop smart sensors from spying on us?

Photo by Ade Oshineye I was at the Marine Robotics Forum at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute last week, and it set a lot of wheels turning in my head. As a newcomer to the field, I was blown away by some of the demonstrations like the Swarm Diver underwater drones, the ChemYak data-gathering robot, Drone Tugs, and WaveGliders. Operating underwater...

Jul 2019

What Machine Learning needs from Hardware

Photo by Kimberly D On Monday I’ll be giving a keynote at the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, which is quite surprising even to me, considering I’m a software engineer who can barely solder! Despite that, I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about when I was offered the invitation. If I have a room full of hardware designers listening to...

Apr 2019