Qualcomm has acquired Dutch start-up Scyfer to bolster one of its most important growth strategies – bringing artificial intelligence (AI) to the device, and putting that device at the heart of services driven by machine learning. The chip giant has been very active in this area, creating technologies and developer platforms for its Snapdragon system-on-chip that allow AI-related applications, such as machine vision, to be processed mainly on the device itself rather than in the cloud. That supports applications like surveillance cameras, which require low latency and local computing. Of course, that in turn enhances the role of the devices which Qualcomm’s silicon powers, rather than the cloud servers where Intel is king. With Scyfer, a spin-off from the University…