The Swarm and Network-edge Technology

A swarm is a number of phenomena massed together in motion in space or time. One technical definition is a group of independent agents interacting with one another and with their environment. Natural examples include a flock of birds, colony of ants and school of fish. There is a unique type of intelligence from the swarm resulting from the collective behavior of decentralized, and self determined and organized systems.

Recent advances in technology, communications and AI allow network-edge devices to produce high value smart data to produce insights and actionable intelligence to achieve specific goals. Very small geographically dispersed high performance compute (HPC) systems allow data science and AI at the edge. Small network-edge HPC systems allow us to place compute to data in contrast to sending data to compute - and this changes the game at a high level.

Edge HPC and AI allows us to architect a process to move from a massive data hose and lake to narrowly channeled smart data to achieve specific goals in near real time at reasonable cost. We can now design distributed learning frameworks where data and intelligence is distributed across independent agents. This can also be combined centrally into different conceptual frameworks and distributed back to individual agents.

Professional data scientists will use swarm intelligence to improve life and provide massive competitive advantages to win the future.