Seeed Studio Partners with Vijay Janapa Reddi for a Machine Learning Systems Edge AI Hardware Kit

Seeed Studio has announced the release of an all-in-one kit for machine learning at the edge, based on a textbook by Vijay Janapa Reddi: the XIAOML Kit.

"Remember that groundbreaking open source [Introduction to] Machine Learning Systems textbook by a collaborative group of contributions [made up] of students, researchers, and practitioners, led by Professor Vijay Janapa Reddi at Harvard University," Seeed Studio's Lily Li asks by way of introduction to the company's latest project launch. "Well, we've turned those concepts into reality! Working closely with Professor Vijay Janapa Reddi and Professor Marcelo Rovai (UNIFEI), we’ve created a hardware companion that brings those textbook pages to life. It’s like having a Machine Learning Systems lab session right in your hands!"

The textbook in question, which is currently available in early-access preview ahead of planned publication by MIT Press in 2026, is somewhat unusual even in academic circles for being developed entirely in-the-open — with not only software code but the source of the book itself available on GitHub, under an admittedly restrictive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

"This grew out of a concern that while students could train AI models," Reddi explains, "few understood how to build the systems that actually make them work. As AI becomes more capable and autonomous, the critical bottleneck won't be the algorithms — it will be the engineers who can build efficient, scalable, and sustainable systems that safely harness that intelligence."

To assist with that , Reddi has worked with Seeed to put together a hardware kit for working through the book's hands-on examples of edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) — small enough to squeeze into a pill bottle. Inside is a compact Espressif ESP32-S3-based XIAO ESP32S3 Sense microcontroller board with integrated camera and microphone, an expansion board that adds a six-axis inertial measurement unit (IMU), and another with a tiny 0.42" OLED display panel.

The kit is now available on the Seeed Studio store at $38.90; the book can be downloaded free of charge from the project website.