An edge-cloud collaborative computing platform for building AIoT applications efficiently

The convergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), or AIoT, has breathed a new life into IoT operations and human-machine interactions. Currently, resource-constrained IoT devices usually cannot provide sufficient capability for data storage and processing so as to support building modern AI models. An intuitive solution is to integrate cloud computing technology into AIoT and exploit the powerful and elastic computing as well as the storage capacity of the servers on the cloud end. Nevertheless, the network bandwidth and communication latency increasingly become serious bottlenecks. The emerging edge computing can complement the cloud-based AIoT in terms of communication latency, and hence attracts more and more attention from the AIoT area. In this paper, we present an industrial edge-cloud collaborative computing platform, namely Sophon Edge, that helps to build and deploy AIoT applications efficiently. As an enterprise-level solution for the AIoT computing paradigm, Sophon Edge adopts a pipeline-based computing model for streaming data from IoT devices. Besides, this platform supports an iterative way for model evolution and updating so as to enable the AIoT applications agile and data-driven. Through a real-world example, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of building an AIoT application based on the Sophon Edge platform.