Cultivation of caloric crops are one of the largest contributors to agricultural land use. Disruption here would have a huge environmental impact. Once carbon dioxide has been fixed you can use carbohydrates as an energy feedstock for many downstream organisms. Where's our lab grown starch startups at?
BirdNET and Pl@ntNet have to be my favorite uses of AI to date. A true use of technology for the greater good.
I've actually been thinking about automated bird recognition for a while now, I live underneath a flight corridor for migrating common cranes (near Berlin). I'd love to be able to one day track their migration across the continent in real time using data from crowdsourced base stations.
I wonder if migrating birds could be identified in flight using optical/radar/audio. If anybody else has had similar ideas I'd really love to chat on this topic.
The iNaturalist app is also quite amazing for identification of all kinds of organisms by image. The also have the "Seek" app which identifies species even offline.
I use both apps, they’re pretty amazing. I typically use Seek first and if it can’t identify the image it lets you upload it to iNaturalist seamlessly for manual identification. I believe then those identifications are then used to further train the model.
The Seek app is one of those things that you can show people and they think it is magic, even in this day and age. I got my mom and my grandma using it!
I've been toying around with photogrammetrically matching in-flight bird silhouettes in order to have a plantnetlike bird classifier.
Very much in the data acquisition stage but I'm seeing moderate success in clustering images by bird shape so far. In between other photogrammetry work I'm starting to think about how to use colour information and reading up on how to select and train a ML model for this problem.
I don't know if you've ever photographed birds, but I suspect this would be difficult because shots that are detailed enough to make out enough detail would be tight in, and shots that covered a large patch of sky would not be detailed enough.
Just speculation though, I'm sure with enough resources these are surmountable issues... I'm just not sure what quantity of resources that is.
Yeh this was my initial concern with optical silhouette classification. The altitude and targets are quite small (and rapidly moving). I've thought about using optical flow analysis to track wingbeat frequency etc as I feel this might be a little simpler to acquire.
On wingbeat frequency I'm very curious to play around with mmWave doppler radar (there's some RF on chip stuff around), emitting a relatively isotropic signal might allow for a pretty wide field of view and I imagine you'd get a pretty reasonable wingbeat signal.
I think bright room lighting is a very promising avenue for SAD and circadian rhythm issues.
Last year, for my house plants, I suspended a pair of 100w full spectrum grow lights in my living room. Throughout the winter I've been using my kitchen table as a workspace and I swear this is the first time in my life that I've completely avoided SAD and my circadian rhythm has been sufficiently advanced that I'm now a morning person. In my configuration the lights are suspended behind me, the glare from having them in direct eyesight is problematic.
Has been absolutely wonderful and can definitely recommend giving it a try, the "quantum board" full spectrum lamps are getting really affordable.
I'd argue the optimum strategy requires you be at least a little optimistic.
Humans are biased to outweigh the importance of losses vs gains when considering expected value. At a minimum a some optimism is required to offset this bias.
Over the years I've had a lot of inconsistent experiences with commercial lactase enzyme supplements for dairy intolerance. I've decided to embark on a hobby project (OpenLactase) to produce my own digestive enzyme supplements from scratch using Aspergillus oryzae fungi.
I'm currently working on designing an open source stirred tank bioreactor (Open Scale-up) for fungi cultivation. Bench-top at first but the design is intended to be suitable for scale-up.
Very different from the day job as cloud infrastructure engineer.
