The Next Frontier of Data Science At The Edge

Join us for the USF Data Science Speaker Series featuring George Williams, an AI Software and Hardware Consultant.

There are billions of computers running in the world today—not just high-powered CPUs and GPUs in data centers, but also everyday devices like laptops, phones, and tablets, as well as tiny computers embedded in appliances, medical devices, satellites, drones, and robots. By 2030, this number is expected to reach 40 billion globally, with many of these devices featuring built-in AI. In just a few years, we may see more deployed AI models than people on the planet.
This pending tsunami of ubiquitous, AI-infused devices is taking shape now, accelerated by a perfect storm of technology convergence. Compression techniques such as mixed precision quantization and distillation can deliver dramatically smaller models that can run at the edge. Advances in chiplet architectures and chip fabrication methods are pushing the limits of size, memory, and power budgets for running models efficiently in compact microelectronics. Communication protocols such as Anthropic's MCP are setting new standards in how models not only consume multi-modal data, but also how agentic models act collectively.
In this talk, George will chart the path from current trends to a near future where machine intelligence is everywhere. In some cases it's autonomous and isolated, while in others it's massively distributed and collaborative. He'll motivate the discussion with specific examples from my experience building distributed autonomy in drone swarms and efficient algorithms that run models in satellites.
He’ll also highlight the emerging role of the embedded system data scientist, equipped to take on challenges such as:
On-device reinforcement fine-tuning

Distributed decision-making by agents
Graph and vector databases optimized for compact systems
AI-driven hardware and chip design
Novel cybersecurity strategies for edge AI systems

RSVP now to secure your spot and explore the next frontier of AI!

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