Discover the work of researcher Marcelo Fernandes from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN)
The intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and Edge Computing is reshaping industry and healthcare. The work of researcher Marcelo Fernandes, from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), who has been working with AI for 25 years, explores this integration. He is currently involved in three thematic areas within INCT ICoNIoT: Industrial IoT, Edge Computing, and Healthcare.
Marcelo Fernandes
Marcelo explains that one of the major obstacles to deploying machine learning (ML) on IoT devices is model size. Although ML models for IoT are not language models and are smaller than Large Language Models (LLMs), they can still be too large to fit on resource-constrained devices. The proposed solution involves compressed models. In collaboration with Professor H. T. Kung from Harvard University, Marcelo Fernandes developed two innovative aware compression techniques. The compression is considered “aware” because the model not only learns to perform its task but also learns to compress itself. This occurs during training, where the model is forced to use fewer bits and to self-prune by removing nodes based on their importance. Other techniques reduce model size after training, but this often leads to a drop in accuracy.
The two techniques proposed by the researchers are:
- Iterative Aware Compression Based on Quantization Followed by Pruning
- Iterative Aware Compression Based on Pruning Followed by Quantization
The researchers’ first publication on this topic appeared in 2021 (doi: 10.1109/IJCNN52387.2021.9534430). Since then, Fernandes has been testing these techniques with a focus on various applications. They are now being applied to IoT devices for the first time—this direction began when Marcelo Fernandes started working with ICoNIoT. He is currently supervising a PhD student, Mateus Golbarg, and a Master’s student, Vitor Fidelis Freitas, at UFRN, who are also working within this