An Early Resource Characterization of Deep Learning on Wearables, Smartphones and Internet-of-Things Devices

Detecting and reacting to user behavior and ambient context are core elements of many emerging mobile sensing and Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. However, extracting accurate infer-ences from raw sensor data is challenging within the noisy and complex environments where these systems are deployed. Deep Learning – is one of the most promising approaches for overcom-ing this challenge, and achieving more robust and reliable infer-ence. Techniques developed within this rapidly evolving area of machine learning are now state-of-the-art for many inference tasks (such as, audio sensing and computer vision) commonly needed by IoT and wearable applications. But currently deep learning al-gorithms are seldom used in mobile/IoT class hardware because they often impose debilitating levels of system overhead (e.g., memory, computation and energy). Efforts to address this bar-rier to deep learning adoption are slowed by our lack of a system-atic understanding of how these algorithms behave at inference time on resource constrained hardware. In this paper, we present the first – albeit preliminary – measurement study of common deep learning models (such as Convolutional Neural Networks and Deep Neural Networks) on representative mobile and embed-ded platforms. The aim of this investigation is to begin to build knowledge of the performance characteristics, resource require-ments and the execution bottlenecks for deep learning models when being used to recognize categories of behavior and context. The results and insights of this study, lay an empirical foundation for the development of optimization methods and execution envi-ronments that enable deep learning to be more readily integrated into next-generation IoT, smartphones and wearable systems