January 2020 Summaries

The monthly roundup from the Google Developers Social Team, shared by Natalie Dao, highlights key events and updates for developers in early 2020, promising an exciting year ahead. It features the Indie Games Festival, slated for April in Europe, Japan, and South Korea, encouraging indie developers and gamers to participate. The post details Ecovacs Robotics' use of TensorFlow Lite in robotic vacuum cleaners, the Developer Student Clubs' global challenge, and the launch of the Assistant on Air podcast. Flutter and Dart's recognition by Fast Company, the TensorFlow Dev Summit, Google Cloud Next '20, and new Coral products are also spotlighted, alongside Firebase's Cloud Firestore series and the anticipation for Google I/O 2020. The roundup encourages staying connected through various social media channels for continuous updates from the Google Developer ecosystem.

MediaPipe is a framework designed to create cross-platform multimodal machine learning pipelines, and its team, led by Michael Hays and Tyler Mullen, has developed a way to run these pipelines directly in web browsers using WebAssembly and XNNPack ML Inference Library. By integrating this capability into the MediaPipe Visualizer tool, users can design and test MediaPipe graphs live in the browser with the aid of WebGL for rendering and a simple API for JavaScript and C++ communication. While WebAssembly generally executes faster than JavaScript, it is slower than native C++, prompting optimizations like GPU use for image operations and the XNNPack library for speed improvements. However, current limitations include restricted graph calculators and single-threaded execution, with future plans to expand functionality and remove these constraints. The article acknowledges contributions from several individuals and encourages following updates on the Google Developer blog and Twitter for further developments.

Local AI is gaining traction across various industries due to its advantages in speed, bandwidth savings, and user privacy. Coral, a platform from Google Research, offers hardware components and software tools to facilitate the development and scaling of local AI products, with its offerings now available in 36 countries. For 2020, Coral introduced new products to enhance its platform, including the Coral Accelerator Module, which integrates the Edge TPU ASIC and supports both PCIe and USB interfaces for custom designs, and the Coral Dev Board Mini, which offers a compact, cost-effective solution for computer vision tasks. The System-on-Module (SoM) now comes in variations with increased RAM, broadening its application potential in smart cities, manufacturing, and healthcare. Additionally, Asus has incorporated the Coral SoM into its Tinker Edge T single-board computer, designed for makers. These advancements, showcased at CES 2020, underscore Coral's commitment to expanding the possibilities of local AI solutions.