In Neuchâtel, Switzerland, two professors from the Haute Ecole Arc Ingénierie (HES-SO), Nuria Pazos and Nabil Ouerhani, will be leading the European research programme BonsAPPs. This project aims to democratize the use of artificial intelligence at the edge of the network (Edge) within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The objective of the BonsAPPs program is to develop an AI-as-a-Service offering to promote the implementation of artificial intelligence solutions at the edge of the network (Edge) within SMEs. The BonsAPPs project leverages Bonseyes, a marketplace developed as part of a previous research program (active between 2017 and 2020) in which the HEArc Engineering (HES-SO) was a partner. This marketplace provides access to resources (models, data, experiments) to deploy and exchange AI applications on high-performance embedded systems.

Nuria Pazos, one of the pilots, hopes that this program will develop “a sort of federalist system where decision-making is no longer centralized in external servers but takes place as close as possible to the sensors. For this reason, a call for projects has been launched in this sense. Use cases will be tested with volunteer SMEs, in collaboration with developers and integrators specialized in AI. Through these tests, BonsAPPs hopes to contribute to the improvement of technology transfer, by providing SMEs with access to a fully functional and secure AI platform. Nabil Ouerhani, the second pilot of BonsApps is already thinking about the future: “We could imagine a pilot project with a machine manufacturer in the field of predictive maintenance. Another possibility is also envisaged: to collaborate with a robotics integrator on autonomous production using image processing”.

The European Union, which has already financed this project to the tune of 5 million euros, has also integrated it into the AI4EU (Artificial Intelligence for the European Union) platform with a view to overcoming its technological dependence on the United States and China.

Translated from Le projet européen BonsAPPs souhaite porter l’IA à la périphérie du réseau afin d’aider les PME