Archana 
Every open source project dreams of being able to take on its wings and become successful. But we know these projects need effort, time and above all the funding to help support the dreams of people who started it.
When we started working on TinyML, we started with a vision to democratise TinyML education. We are constantly surrounded by IoT devices, from smartphones to watches and even smart ovens. As AI enters every aspect of our lives, it becomes vital to understand how neural networks work on tiny devices like microcontrollers or smartphones. Moreover being able to deploy models to these devices will also become a vital skill for Machine Learning engineers.
In the first study group we hosted, we covered a range of topics, like optimisation techniques, hardware devices and research directions in TinyML. However, we quickly came to realise that most of the people starting out in the field did not have access to microcontrollers to experiment and practice on!
For us, in an ideal learning environment, people should have access to a hardware library where they they can borrow hardware to learn and use and then forward it to other people who might need it. We think this will be a great community effort to bring about TinyML education to everyone who wants to learn. Along with the hardware, we will also have a software framework: ScaleDown to get you started with your first TinyML project!
With that introduction, we are happy to announce that our project is very fortunate to be funded by No Starch Press Foundation this year!! Wohoo!!
Our project has two main pillars: Education and Framework. Our blogs, books and study groups will help you learn TinyML. The hardware library will help you build your first project using the framework. After implementing your projects, you can write about your experience and help grow the community by teching others. In this way Education will feed into the Framework.
With this, we hope to reach more people and increase TinyML education in the community!
This field has definitely been hardware dependent, but we are trying to solve this by setting up hardware libraries near you. So reach out to us, if you want to start a hardware library in your city! We would love to help you set up and provide hardware to support this!
If a hardware library does not interest you but you still want to be founding members in building and supporting this project? Fill up this form and we will reach back to you!
We are truly grateful to NSPF for their grant in getting this project off the ground.
This funding gives us confidence that our idea is valid and important for the community. I think most of us have ideas to help the community and organisations like NSPF give us hope that every idea no matter how crazy you think they are, has a chance to be funded!
This is not all, we have plans to support TinyML research, build more TinyML tools and create even more educational materials like books, courses and study groups! We will tell you all about those plans shortly! For the list of projects that got funded from NSPF, check out the link here.
