Category: Updates and Notes

Updates And Notes

Launching a new project about Generative AI!

I am so excited to announce a new project I am working on as part of my new developed interests and experiences!
I am launching a new blog, dedicated to Generative AI, but completely focused over the idea to have a personal, local, secure, ethical, and developed using your own hardware, without spending money for new one.

Introducing bare-metal.ai

And how I wrote on the mission page:

Generative AI is undoubtedly incredible: everyday it is demonstrating phenomenal abilities and a proven potential across thousands of different scenarios. However, it also demonstrates the requirement of massive amount in computational resources to run: really impractical for many average users who would like to practice without investing thousands of dollars to just experiment with it and find the right tool.

My mission is to help driving the evangelism and the development of solutions that allow to execute simple, complex, and, why not, super advanced tasks on your hardware, without the need of cloud providers or bled yourself dry to buy a new GPU.

Embark with me on this journey to discover new tools, new algorithms, and new tricks to run Generative AI on prem. On your bare metal.

No expensive subscriptions or uncontrollable billing on your credit card.

I will focus on a few key concepts:

  • open source All the solutions proposed are freely available to you: to download, to try, to uncover, to replicate, and to improve with your contributions. AI should always be part of human knowledge as literature and science.
  • local Local Training. Local Tuning. Local Inference. Local RAG. Going local means taking full advantage of your hardware, saving money and going green.
  • personal Personal also means “Out of the grid”, so you’ll able to also download the tools you need, allowing you to directly experiment in your homelab, with consumer-grade hardware.
  • private Private is synonym of secure. Your documents, your info, your secrets remain yours, residing in your local storage.
  • ethical Develop a responsible AI, balancing censorship and reducing the bias of the information without the influences of governments and big tech corporations. Make it yours.
  • community Fostering collaboration and international cooperation in AI democratization.

Join me in my new adventure, and let me know your feedback and your ideas!

Reviving francesco.world (or die trying)

After a long time, I am returning to write on the pages of this blog. I am so sorry. Maybe, you are thinking that it’s not so complex to find a brief time slot once a week to put down a few rows to keep my audience aligned on what I am doing, the news, and a few exciting projects I am working on. But, no, in the end, it’s really hard.

Let me resume the last few years: I started this blog as a showcase of what I was, and what I was capable of. At the time, I was quitting Google, as Google Cloud Platform Community Manager for EMEA, and I was terrified I should not be able to find another excellent (or, at least, good) job. With the term “excellent” or “good”, I don’t mean in the sense of “profitable”; in fact, earning money and saving them for the future was never the point for me. I never worked for the profit. I swear. 

I always did it for me: the actual income was my joy in exploring something new, to feel I was a big gear in a massive mechanism. Something relevant. Someone on the stage presenting geeky stuff, always protagonist, always in touch with his community. Consider that: back in 2011, I started working for Intel, directly before completing my university degree, then I switched to Google. Two huge companies. One after another. I was young, and I started directly flying in the sky touching the stars. Leaving Google was equal to fall back on the earth. At the time, I was saying to myself “ok, now I need to jump into another big tech company. I need to do it. It’s life or death”. 

So, I started the blog.

I needed to showcase recruiters more than what was on my cv or on my LinkedIn profile.

Since then, things changed a lot. I stopped challenging myself. I was forced to refocus. To re-evaluate my aspirations, what’s really important for me, and, probably most important, to find a new balance between my personal life and my job. 

Today, I am back. Back to find again joy in what I am doing, besides what it brings to my career, to my resume. 

Codemotion OnLine Italian Edition 2020

A real quick post to advise that I’ll be the Master of Ceremonies (MC) of the Third Day (2020, the November 26th) of Codemotion OnLine Italian Edition. Major Info on conference portal at https://events.codemotion.com/conferences/online/2020/online-tech-conference-italian-edition/agenda/.

Seems yesterday I was invited to held the keynote of Codemotion Amsterdam 2019 , and immense pure joy, but during 2020, ’cause of the global pandemic, I was not able to join any event since February. Some light at the end of the tunnel, thanks again Codemotion Team who invited me to join the online version of the Italian Edition of the conference with an active role.

In details, “my day” will be totally dedicated to “AI/MACHINE LEARNING, TEAM & TECH CAREER” and this makes me just more than happy and honoured to be part of an amazing event.

My duties will consist in present speakers, drive the agenda during the whole day, address questions and supporting requests provided by the audience.

I still have two extra-Premium tickets to donate for free to my readers, so feel free to drop me an email through the Contact Form if you are interested in joining this incredible technical conference!

[On the Green Pad] AVNET Azure Sphere

On the Green Pad this week I received from Farnell a Developer Kit for the new Microsoft Sphere. This is one of the multiple different iteration of a compatible IoT device reference-design for Sphere, that still in “Preview” as public Beta release (but should go public very soon, September fall).

AVNET Azure Sphere
AVNET Azure Sphere

Still that the AVG implementation is really interesting under various aspects. In particular, this version is the Avnet Azure Sphere MT3620 Starter Kit (product code AES-MS-MT3620-SK-G) and it’s a production-ready module based on the MediaTek MT3620 SoC, a Arm® Cortex™-A7 processor with the low overhead.

The design guarantees real-time thanks the two Arm Cortex-M4F microcontrollers; furthermore, the carrier board provides two MikroE Click expansion sockets and one Grove expansion connector (I2C), as sensors we can find 3-Axis accelerometer, 3-Axis gyroscope, temperature and pressure/barometric ones.

Currently, I don’t know exactly how to take fully advantage of this board in one of my projects, but it will be a good opportunity to try out Azure Sphere framework.

It is surely a wise move to give away few samples of these boards to make possible for developers to deepen on new technologies. It reminds me when I was working in Intel and we were giving away multiple devices (smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks, etc…) as reference design platforms and SDP (Software Development Platform) to developers to make them able to experiment with the newborn (at that time) Windows 8 ecosystem (such as WinRT runtime for Metro-apps) or with Android early x86-based implementations. Well Done Microsoft and AVNET!

[On the Green Pad] Google’s Computing at Edge

On the Green Pad this week arrived the Google’s Coral Computing@Edge devices: the Coral USB Accelerator and the Coral Dev Board. Both mount the Edge TPU running TensorFlow Lite framework that brings ML inferencing.

I am planning to write few articles on them… so, stay tuned! 😉

Coral Dev Board and Coral Accelerator

Codemotion Amsterdam 2019 slides are online!

Since 2012, I supported Codemotion through my different incarnation in different companies. Before as Developer Relations Manager in Intel, and then as Cloud Community Manager for Google.

Thanks to Codemotion I always had the chance to present and front of a wide audience of students, hobbiests, but mainly little or big professionals.

But in 2019, I had the amazing opportunity to open Codemotion Amsterdam 2019!

My talk was dedicated to IoT: in particular, my idea was to deliver something inspirational and technological at the same time, opening eyes on how much important is nowadays to bring intelligence directly to the edge in our IoT scenarios, avoiding useless consumptions of Cloud resources (internal and external network bandwidth, virtual machines configurations, etc…).

IoT revolution is ended. Thanks to hardware improvement, building an intelligent ecosystem is easier than never before for both startups and large-scale enterprises. The real challenge is now to connect, process, store and analyze data: in the cloud, but also, at the edge. We’ll give a quick look on frameworks that aggregate dispersed devices data into a single global optimized system allowing to improve operational efficiency, to predict maintenance, to track asset in real-time, to secure cloud-connected devices and much more.

Talk abstract

Now, the slides of my presentation are freely available on Slideshare under Creative Commons (CC) license.

For any info or question don’t hesitate to contact me!

Let me close, with few photos! 🙂