MiniDeep: A Standalone AI-Edge Platform with a Deep Learning-Based MINI-PC and AI-QSR System

In this paper, we present a new AI (Artificial Intelligence) edge platform, called “MiniDeep”, which provides a standalone deep learning platform based on the cloud-edge architecture. This AI-Edge platform provides developers with a whole deep learning development environment to set up their deep learning life cycle processes, such as model training, model evaluation, model deployment, model inference, ground truth collecting, data pre-processing, and training data management. To the best of our knowledge, such a whole deep learning development environment has not been built before. MiniDeep uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the backend platform of a deep learning tuning management model. In the edge device, the OpenVino enables deep learning inference acceleration at the edge. To perform a deep learning life cycle job, MiniDeep proposes a mini deep life cycle (MDLC) system which is composed of several microservices from the cloud to the edge. MiniDeep provides Train Job Creator (TJC) for training dataset management and the models’ training schedule and Model Packager (MP) for model package management. All of them are based on several AWS cloud services. On the edge device, MiniDeep provides Inference Handler (IH) to handle deep learning inference by hosting RESTful API (Application Programming Interface) requests/responses from the end device. Data Provider (DP) is responsible for ground truth collection and dataset synchronization for the cloud. With the deep learning ability, this paper uses the MiniDeep platform to implement a recommendation system for AI-QSR (Quick Service Restaurant) KIOSK (interactive kiosk) application. AI-QSR uses the MiniDeep platform to train an LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory)-based recommendation system. The LSTM-based recommendation system converts KIOSK UI (User Interface) flow to the flow sequence and performs sequential recommendations with food suggestions. At the end of this paper, the efficiency of the proposed MiniDeep is verified through real experiments. The experiment results have demonstrated that the proposed LSTM-based scheme performs better than the rule-based scheme in terms of purchase hit accuracy, categorical cross-entropy, precision, recall, and F1 score.