If you are interested in delving into the world of computer vision and image recognition then the new Neural Compute Stick from Intel is something you should be aware of.  For a mere $100 you get a system on a stick with a Movidius Myriad X VPU, which can be used with Intel's version of the OpenVINO toolkit to develop machine vision applications.  You don't need any special hardware, just plug this into a USB 3.0 port and get programming.  If this seems up your alley you can follow the links from The Inquirer for more details.

"Intel claims this is the first stick to feature a neural compute engine for dedicated hardware neural network inference (essentially the technique of putting AI smarts into action) accelerator."

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