Distributed Artificial Intelligent Systems

The ascent of artificial intelligence in edge computing and the accompanying ascent of cloud storage and computing has swept over Europe without any local winners and, at times, in clear conflict with the European way of life. The cloud paradigm is based on technologies that are dominated by American and Chinese companies. The commercial approach towards privacy of the American companies and the governmental interference of the Chinese companies makes Europe’s dependence these technologies undesirable. At the same time the demand for artificial intelligence is pulled from the current devices that roughly equal the capacity of a laptop towards devices that have a significantly smaller footprint but a much higher prevalence. The highest benefit of using these smaller devices is found when used very close to where reality is sensed or influenced. This calls for small, low cost, distributed devices. These types of devices makes using centralized architectures, such as cloud solutions, less logical and opens the door for a paradigm switch towards distributed thinking (for example peer-to-peer, mesh). This switch also provides Europe with an opportunity to catch up and provide solutions that show European values such as energy efficiency, self organisation and privacy by design. This project builds a consortium that delivers a solution in each of the key application areas of which all smart, AI enabled, components are delivered by European members of the consortium based on the key European values named above.