Cyber Agriculture

My own strong interest and background in botany makes me consider this closely, consider the implications.  In particular have been experimenting with basil flavors for years.   While the smells of basils can be considerable, they often do not perform as distinctly in dishes.   Can we program in robust flavors?  Following.

MIT’s ‘cyber-agriculture’ optimizes basil flavors   By Devin Coldewey @techcrunch

The days when you could simply grow a basil plant from a seed by placing it on your windowsill and watering it regularly are gone — there’s no point now that machine learning-optimized hydroponic “cyber-agriculture” has produced a superior plant with more robust flavors. The future of pesto is here.

This research didn’t come out of a desire to improve sauces, however. It’s a study from MIT’s Media Lab and the University of Texas at Austin aimed at understanding how to both improve and automate farming.

In the study, published today in PLOS ONE, the question being asked was whether a growing environment could find and execute a growing strategy that resulted in a given goal — in this case, basil with stronger flavors.

Such a task is one with numerous variables to modify — soil type, plant characteristics, watering frequency and volume, lighting and so on — and a measurable outcome: concentration of flavor-producing molecules. That means it’s a natural fit for a machine learning model, which from that variety of inputs can make a prediction as to which will produce the best output.

“We’re really interested in building networked tools that can take a plant’s experience, its phenotype, the set of stresses it encounters, and its genetics, and digitize that to allow us to understand the plant-environment interaction,” explained MIT’s Caleb Harper in a news release. The better you understand those interactions, the better you can design the plant’s lifecycle, perhaps increasing yield, improving flavor or reducing waste.  .... " 

The Breadth of Machine Learning

Some useful and in my experience correct ideas.   Its still hard to produce and learn general intelligence.  What worked for us was to be as narrow as possible, with rules or by neurons.   Narrow is also useful too for maintenance, as context expands over time.   You start to lose good understanding of what data must be learned.  Learning about changing scope is important. The example area,  culinary knowledge, is an area of interest of mine.

The AI revolution will be led by toasters, not droids

It’s far easier for software to learn to do one thing well than to be a digital jack of all trades   By Janelle Shane in Fastcompany

Will the intelligent algorithms of the future look like general-purpose robots, as adept at idle banter and reading maps as they are handy in the kitchen? Or will our digital assistants look more like a grab-bag of specialized gadgets–less a single chatty master chef than a kitchen full of appliances?

If an algorithm tries to do too much, it gets in trouble. The recipe below was generated by an artificial neural network, a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that learns by example. This particular algorithm scrutinized about 30,000 cookbook recipes of all sorts, from soups to pies to barbecues, and then tried to come up with its own. The results are, shall we say, somewhat unorthodox:  ... " 

Kroger Opens Culinary Innovation Center

Always interested in how we can innovate, was part of a number of innovation center efforts. Surprised that Kroger has not done this before.  Now I would ask, how will this do things like spot trends in foods, in consumer process, in connecting resources to customers?   And link those trends to consumer behavior and purchase?    Start thinking about data and pattern and directions. 

Kroger opens Culinary Innovation Center
Downtown Cincinnati facility to facilitate development of food service concepts and products for entire chain

Richard Turcsik in Supermarket News

The Kroger Co. today debuted its Culinary Innovation Center, featuring a commercial kitchen with multiple cooking stations, spaces and capabilities, including technology that allows video streaming of educational sessions to Kroger associates across the country.

Kroger spent a reported $2.5 million remodeling the two-story brick building at 901 W. Elm St. in downtown Cincinnati, not far from its corporate headquarters, into the LEED-designed facility. Construction on the Center began in March 2017. .... "