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AI being used for all sorts of tasks, even small ones, is the topic of this episode of The AI Minute.
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Transcript:
In Japan, a man named Makoto Koike started helping out at his parents’ cucumber farm. He saw the way that his mom spent eight hours a day sorting cucumbers by size, shape, color, and number of thorns. It turns out that long, straight, thorny cucumbers bring the largest prices, but longness, and straightness and thorniness are on a continuum, and they’re not binary characteristics. So Makoto did what anybody would do in that circumstance, he built an AI-based sorting robot.
He used TensorFlow and deep learning to train the AI. A Raspberry Pi is used to ascertain if something is a cucumber, then the image is sent to a beefier Linux box for classification. Then he used an Arduino device to do the actual sorting. And tada! The moral of the story is that if AI can be used on such a specialized and narrow task as sorting cucumbers, then the number of use cases really is enormous. Looking at the world with that in mind, you might just find yourself spotting all kinds of places to apply artificial intelligence.
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