Visual AI at the edge is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, even reaching some traditionally lower tech sectors like gas station convenience stores. In this conversation, Bill sits down with Sridhar Sudarsan, the CTO at SparkCognition, to discuss their visual AI products and how they have been deployed at scale throughout gas stations and how they are using visual AI to enhance school safety. They dive into ethical considerations of visual AI at the edge and how SparkCognition thinks about operations in addition to model training.

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“These AI systems are really a tool that helps the human, who then helps the AI systems, who then helps the human. And we're constantly pushing the barrier to raise the bar.”

“From an industry perspective, Murphy's Law continues to apply and I think we continue to find hardware getting less and less expensive, more processing happening at lower costs.”

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(01:18) How did Sridhar get started in technology? 

(02:16) Sridhar’s time at IBM

(10:45) Visual AI use cases at gas stations 

(18:13) Using existing camera infrastructure 

(20:43) Developing an economic model to deploy edge AI

(25:11) ROI calculator 

(29:02) Privacy and visual AI in schools 

(34:32) Training ethical AI 

(40:46) Sridhar’s favorite deployments 

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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com/edge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.

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Over the Edge is hosted by Bill Pfeifer, and was created by Matt Trifiro and Ian Faison. Executive producers are Matt Trifiro, Ian Faison, Jon Libbey and Kyle Rusca. The show producer is Erin Stenhouse. The audio engineer is Brian Thomas. Additional production support from Elisabeth Plutko and Eric Platenyk.

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Connect with Sridhar Sudarsan on LinkedIn

How is AI being used at the edge, and what possibilities does this create for businesses? In this episode, host Bill Pfeifer sits down with the co-authors of the book AI at the Edge, Jenny Plunkett, Senior Developer Relations Engineer and Daniel Situnayake, Head of ML at Edge Impulse. They discuss how to determine which problems can actually be addressed through AI at the edge, how to think about effective AI, and unexpected use cases in generative AI and synthetic data generation. Plus, they cover how AI can support data distillation efforts and how to build teams that can successfully navigate this landscape. 

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“We're going to be using generative AI to help us build a synthetic data set to train other AI models to deploy to edge devices.” - Jenny

“One of the things that's really cool about synthetic data and using generative AI for that, is it potentially reduces the cost of training a model because instead of having to spend huge amounts of money labeling all this data, if you create the data yourself, you can have it implicitly be labeled.” - Dan 

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(01:49) How did they get started in tech? 

(03:14) What brought them to AI?

(08:12) What brought them together to write their book?

(13:26) Determining which problems can be addressed with AI at the edge

(15:51) What possibilities does AI at the edge create for businesses? 

(20:41) Synthetic data and generative AI 

(24:15) Using AI for data distillation 

(31:00) Building a skilled and interdisciplinary team 

(39:30) AI’s transition from a career path to a tool 

(43:06) Effective AI 

(46:46) Edge / wildlife conservation case study 

(49:37) What are they excited about moving forward? 

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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com/edge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.

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Over the Edge is hosted by Bill Pfeifer, and was created by Matt Trifiro and Ian Faison. Executive producers are Matt Trifiro, Ian Faison, Jon Libbey and Kyle Rusca. The show producer is Erin Stenhouse. The audio engineer is Brian Thomas. Additional production support from Elisabeth Plutko and Eric Platenyk.

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Connect with Jenny Plunkett on LinkedIn

Connect with Daniel Situnayake on LinkedIn and Twitter

Daniel’s substack

What can IT learn from OT and vice versa? How are these two groups collaborating and where is it difficult for them to see eye-to-eye? In this episode, Bill sits down with Jeroen Mackenbach, Engineering Technologist for the Edge Portfolio at Dell Technologies, who has extensive experience on both the IT and OT side, and who has been writing and speaking about the ways the two groups can relate to one another to work together. They dive into the various perspectives each group brings and how this will influence the edge.

Key Quotes:

“What I see is that OT and IT, they aren't getting along because there's a lot of very different areas that they're interested in. It's a tough equation.” 

“OT is doing a lot of innovation to make sure that they can actually utilize all of those resources in a deterministic way. And we now need IT to actually adopt it to make sure that we have the capabilities to actually run these virtualized workloads.

“It's a lot of interaction between the OT and the IT world, which is happening. And that allows us to also do a lot of innovation, together with these partners which is a good thing because we're making a lot of progress there.”

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(01:20) How Jeroen got started in technology 

(02:37) Why did he move into IT?

(04:55) IT versus OT

(06:20) How can we remove friction between IT and OT?

(10:41) Tech cycles in IT, OT and at the edge 

(13:03) Why Jeroen wrote a blog about IT and OT  

(15:55) Is automation at the edge bringing IT and OT closer together?

(19:12) Operating at an IT scale with OT level security 

(21:40) SCADA networks and security 

(28:07) Collaboration between both ways of thinking

(34:13) What IT and OT learn from each other 

(40:00) What is Jeroen focused on next? 

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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com/edge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.

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Over the Edge is hosted by Bill Pfeifer, and was created by Matt Trifiro and Ian Faison. Executive producers are Matt Trifiro, Ian Faison, Jon Libbey and Kyle Rusca. The show producer is Erin Stenhouse. The audio engineer is Brian Thomas. Additional production support from Elisabeth Plutko and Eric Platenyk.

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Connect with Jeroen on LinkedIn

Hear more from Jeroen: 

• Dell NativeEdge: Securing your edge environments with zero trust technology
• How to Protect Your Edge Estate and How NativeEdge Can Deploy It
• Dell NativeEdge Speeds Edge Deployments with FIDO Device Onboard (FDO)

How has computer vision evolved and what is its potential at the edge? In this conversation, Host Bill Pfeifer sits down with Wayne Arvidson, Global Director, Market Development & Strategy at Dell Technologies, to discuss in depth. They dive into five key themes in computer vision use cases, discussing personnel and facility safety, operational efficiency, personal experience, sustainability and revenue enhancement. They also consider whether we will have data marts down the road, and the role of generative AI. 

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“The thing that people are looking for from computer vision, they're looking for real time situational awareness. Whether that's from a safety perspective, whether it's from an operations perspective, doesn't matter. And the only way to do that is it's got to sit at the edge. I've got to be ingesting it, processing it, managing it there at the edge. I've got to be where that physical world meets the digital world.”

“There's a lot of information in there that's untapped. As we see the power of edge compute increase, as we see this federated approach to how we work with these edge-based solutions, we're going to start seeing a lot more integration of that information together.”

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(01:10) How Wayne got started in technology 

(04:51) Wayne’s experience through three technology inflections 

(13:49) Wayne’s move into computer vision 

(16:17) Defining computer vision 

(18:00) Computer vision and the edge 

(20:18) Five key themes in computer vision use cases 

(20:30) Personnel and facility safety use cases

(22:55) Personal experience use cases

(24:13) Operational efficiency use cases 

(26:20) Sustainability use cases 

(27:32) Revenue enhancement use cases 

(30:14) Making computer vision enhancing, instead of an invasion of privacy

(35:10) Value in data that we may not have thought of yet 

(38:36) Will we have a data mart? 

(42:40) Generative AI and the edge 

(45:23) The next five years 

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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com/edge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.

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Over the Edge is hosted by Bill Pfeifer, and was created by Matt Trifiro and Ian Faison. Executive producers are Matt Trifiro, Ian Faison, Jon Libbey and Kyle Rusca. The show producer is Erin Stenhouse. The audio engineer is Brian Thomas. Additional production support from Elisabeth Plutko and Eric Platenyk.

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Connect with Wayne on LinkedIn

Learn more from Wayne: 

Seeing The Bigger Picture: Transforming Data Insights into Increased Profitability and Growth - Vlog

Beyond the Platform: An Outcome Driven Computer Vision Strategy - Webinar

This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Bill Pfeifer and Dan Cummins, Dell Technologies Fellow / VP of Edge Computing. The two sit down to discuss the challenges and constraints at the edge, and the associated obstacles to building edge solutions. Dan dives into NativeEdge, a new edge operations software platform that centralizes deployment and management of edge infrastructure, sharing the thought process behind its creation.

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“Solving for the edge is really solving for distributed computing. And then you need to understand the constraints on each of those locations based on the vertical that you're in.”

“The thing that most excites me is the ability to federate your processing at these edge locations, right? I mean, the only way the world is going to scale is by federating this processing where the data is being generated.”

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(01:10) How Dan got started in technology 

(03:19) Dan’s journey to Dell 

(05:54) What prompted Dan’s move into edge technologies 

(08:24) The evolution of the edge and the need for a horizontal platform 

(17:53) Cloud-out versus edge-in 

(21:18) The process of building NativeEdge 

(25:58) The connection between edge and multicloud 

(27:52) Challenges with orchestrating across the edge 

(33:29) Challenges the edge still needs to evolve to address

(36:17) Silicon diversity and hardware at the edge/core

(39:10) Possibilities that Dan is excited about at the edge 

(42:05) Edge’s impact on business and society 

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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com/edge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.

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Follow Bill Pfeifer on LinkedIn

Connect with Dan Cummins on LinkedIn

You can learn more about NativeEdge through these resources: NativeEdge website, NativeEdge Vlog and NativeEdge 

webinar
 

This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Bill Pfeifer and Jeff Necciai, CTO of Duos Technologies. Bill and Jeff dive into how Duos’s railcar inspection portals collect and process data at the edge, then use AI to quickly detect defects. They discuss how this reduces dwell times when trains are sitting for repair and increases the safety of railway workers. They also cover the other transportation industries that Duos has their eyes on and the challenges they continue to work on in the railway industry.

Key Quotes:

“Our cornerstone product is the Railcar Inspection Portal, where we take 360 degree views of trains at track speed. And we provide the ability to do a remote visual inspection on those, a very detailed remote visual inspection, and we also provide AI around that to automatically detect defects and anomalies on those rail cars.”

“When we're acquiring data from a train that's moving 125 miles an hour, we're capturing over 80 gigabytes of data per second.”

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(01:15) Jeff’s journey and how he got to Duos Technologies

(03:39) Overview of Duos Technologies

(05:19) Collecting rail data at the edge 

(07:21) What do they use the data for? 

(08:46) How were railcars inspected before Duos’s technology? 

(12:39) Benefits of remote inspection for the workers 

(15:10) Can improving the rail industry reduce carbon footprint? 

(17:57) Processing data at the edge railside 

(20:23) What data is most valuable?

(22:23) AI and using human-in-the-loop

(25:13) Environmental challenges on the railways 

(29:05) Applying this technology to cars and planes 

(33:11) The excitement of the railcar engineers 

(36:11) The speed challenge 

(38:39) New tech that Jeff is excited about 

(41:26) Sharing rail safety data with the industry 

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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting DellTechnologies.com/edge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.

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Connect with Jeff Necciai on LinkedIn

Duos Technologies Delivers Near Real-Time Defect Identification Automation

This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Bill Pfeifer and Dr. Ayotunde Coker, the CEO of Open Access Data Centres. Dr. Coker joined the company in June 2022 and has moved rapidly, deploying over 35 data centers across South Africa and Nigeria to address the data center deficit in Africa, accelerating the continent’s digital transformation. In this conversation, Dr. Coker discusses edge as a continuum, the opportunities in Africa and the impact of AI.

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“What's the edge? The edge is a continuum.”

“The core essence of what we do is bringing this core, open, converged digital infrastructure together that actually is changing the narrative in Africa. It's bringing digital infrastructure penetration into the continent and transforming economies in the continent.”

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(01:20) How did Dr. Coker get started in technology?

(02:40) What brought Dr. Coker to Open Access Data  Centres

(07:22) OADC’s edge data centers 

(13:27) The edge as a continuum 

(16:23) How OADC is investing in infrastructure in Africa 

(19:48) The large market in Africa of the “young, content-rich demographic”

(21:17) What are OADC's customers doing at the edge? 

(28:14) Overcoming lack of power 

(32:06) How OADC thinks about sustainability 

(37:42) How is AI impacting their work?

(46:28) What comes next for OADC?

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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting DellTechnologies.com/SimplifyYourEdge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.

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Connect with Dr. Coker on LinkedIn

In this episode of Over the Edge, Matt Trifiro sits down with Bill Pfeifer, Edge Portfolio and Thought Leadership Director at Dell Technologies, to go over a special announcement. The two dive into the creation and history of the Over the Edge podcast, as well as the future of the show. Matt shares what he has learned so far on the show and some of his favorite episodes.

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“This is a huge technology swing, right? This is like cloud was 15 years ago, but we're still at the very opening acts of edge computing and what it's going to do to the world, the impact it's going to have.” - Bill Pfeifer 

“It's fascinating the different points of view that you come across and the different perspectives. I know what my perspectives on edge are and they're changing all the time but it's a single perspective and everybody else has radically different perspectives on this.” - Bill Pfeifer

“One of my favorite definitions of the edge, and I agree there are lots of them, is where the digital world meets the physical world, and I think there's some truth to that.” - Matt Trifiro 

“My current fascination is artificial intelligence. And again, I'm coming at it from a perspective of sort of a naive user, right? It's like the tricorder. I see a future where every object in our lives, even the most mundane objects like coffee cups and sports coats might be connected to the internet or a network and might have either AI on board or be able to tap into AI that's delivered through a network.” - Matt Trifiro

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(02:00) Announcement from Matt

(02:47) Introduction to Bill Pfeifer

(04:01) The different perspectives on edge 

(13:43) Matt’s reasons for starting the show 

(15:41) Edge topics that Bill is interested in 

(24:15) Matt’s takeaways from the show up to this point 

(28:05) Some of Matt’s favorite episodes 

(34:43) What is Matt interested in moving forward? 

(36:23) Edge questions that Matt still hasn’t gotten answers to 

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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting DellTechnologies.com/SimplifyYourEdge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.

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Follow Matt on LinkedIn
 

Referenced Past Episodes:

Three Decades of Vision for Edge with Mahadev Satyanarayanan (Satya) of Carnegie Mellon University

Stateful Computing, Continuous Intelligence, and Edge AI with Simon Crosby, CTO of SWIM.AI

The Genesis of Edge Computing with Victor Bahl, Technical Fellow at Microsoft Research

Solving the Fundamental Problems of the Cloud with Chetan Venkatesh, CEO & Co-founder of Macrometa

The Future of Edge is Messier Than You Think with Dean Bubley, Founder of Disruptive Analysis

Bringing American Manufacturing into the Fifth Industrial Revolution with Walker Reynolds, President and Solutions Architect of 4.0 Solutions

How Standards Drive Adoption and Enable the Intelligent Edge with Alex Reznik, Distinguished Technologist at HPE and Chair of ETSI MEC

Brewing Beer at the Edge with Matthew Steinberg, Co-Founder of Exhibit 'A' Brewing, and Pierluca Chiodelli,Vice President Engineering Technology & Edge Portfolio Product Management and Customer Operations, Dell Technologies

Dell and Exhibit 'A', Continued with Matthew Steinberg, Co-Founder of Exhibit ‘A’ brewing, and Pierluca Chiodelli,Vice President Engineering Technology & Edge Portfolio Product Management and Customer Operations, Dell Technologies

This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Mike Conlow, Director of Network Strategy at Cloudflare. Mike started his career in political technology and was the deputy CTO for Obama for America, later joining Cloudflare in 2021. Matt and Mike discuss the future of the internet, closing the digital divide, and the work that Mike is doing at Cloudlflare to build a faster, more resilient internet. They also get into why there is a lack of wired broadband competition and network security solutions.

“Once you have a very complete edge network globally, all of a sudden running that logic about what is attack traffic and what is not, we can deliver that in a very performant way from our edge network. And we don't need to have a whole bunch of very expensive, very, very fancy on-premise boxes doing that work. We can do it with computing power on our edge.”

“We should make part of the story about 5G and about edge computing just the whole internet is going to get a lot faster to the point where it should feel mostly instantaneous.”

“12 million people in the United States don't have access to adequate internet, meaning that they don't have a wire outside of their house or a wireless way to connect to really good internet.”

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(02:00) How Mike got started in tech 

(04:13) Mike’s current role at Cloudflare 

(05:04) The range of services at Cloudflare 

(07:36) Defining SASE

(08:35) The Cloudflare network 

(16:12) How Mike thinks about edge

(25:00) The future of faster internet

(30:00) The digital divide 

(34:00) Why is there a lack of wired broadband competition?

(39:00) What should we do to improve the internet?

(44:43) Magic Transit and denial of service protection

(47:41) What Mike is excited about in the future

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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting DellTechnologies.com/SimplifyYourEdge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.

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Connect with Mike on LinkedIn

Connect with Mike on Twitter

This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Keith Basil, GM, Edge Business Unit at SUSE. Keith is an expert in cloud compliance, Kubernetes, OpenStac, cloud, edge, and decentralized architectures, among other specialities. In this conversation, he and Matt discuss K3s, the tiny edge, and the impact that SUSE hopes to have at the edge. They dive into real world examples of how the edge is being used in retail and discuss other use cases that are driving demand for SUSE’s technologies.

Key Quotes:

“And then within that far edge location, we have what we call the tiny edge. And this is basically the industrial IOT space, right? Or the fourth industrial revolution is happening at the tiny edge space.”

“We expect Kubernetes to be everywhere. We expect it to be fully commoditized.”

“The industrial IoT space, we think, is gonna represent the most significant amount of growth for the edge ecosystem in total.”

“In reality, distance doesn't really matter to us. I know some early people defined edge by latency, which I thought was a total fallacy.”

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(02:10) How Basil got into technology 

(03:11) How Basil moved into the industry 

(04:37) Basil’s path into SUSE 

(06:35) What is K3s?

(07:25) How does K3s and other tech from SUSE help at the edge? 

(09:19) How do Basil and SUSE think about the edge? 

(09:43) The tiny edge

(10:14) Near edge and far edge

(11:47) The difference between on-premises and edge 

(12:56) Real world retail example

(13:28) Applications running at the edge at a retail store

(14:58) Other use cases driving demand 

(16:16) How are their customers navigating data center trends?

(19:55) Where does Basil see SUSE going?

(34:32) SUSE’s view towards open source 

(39:17) Akri project

(45:13) What would Basil like to change to accelerate progress at the edge? 

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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting DellTechnologies.com/SimplifyYourEdge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.

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Connect with Basil on LinkedIn

Information on Akri

www.CaspianStudios.com