Kozminski Techblog

See Tree is one of the leading companies in agricultural tech field. The number one priority of See Tree is to oversee their fruiting status of trees in order to increase their productivity. This calls for a device for automated detection of ripe fruits using machine learning techniques. To have better, faster results and to approach this task with all the tools that are needed, See Tree partnered with Ciklum, a company whose task is to help other companies in creating something new with their own specialists.
In this case Ciklum provided See Tree with a team of  skilled R&D experts that had to find a solution to these challenges:

• Small dataset (~500 annotated photos). It was impossible to collect fresh data because oranges were not in season.
• High level of noise in dataset annotation. Annotations to some images didn’t contain required data. Some bounding boxes were not precise enough.
• Dataset contained photo duplicates with different labelling.
• High occlusion level in some pictures, made it difficult to separate instances.

Data preparation 

To prepare data that is required for this task, Ciklum’s team duplicated photos and images of unlabled oranges or invalid polygons. Those images were filtered out of the dataset. The resulting dataset was divided into sets of train, validation and test,  afterwards, stratified by the wide variety of oranges located on the picture.

Model architecture 

The satisfactory end result became acquired with the Faster R-CNN architecture family.This pattern became a modern

method for resolving object detection task. ” Faster R-CNN is a two-stage object detection system in which the first

stage generates a sparse set of candidate object locations and the second stage classifies each candidate location as one of the foreground classes or as background using a convolutional neural network.”

Result

Ciklum’s and See Tree’s prototype had these advantages:

• able to detect ripe fruits with high accuracy, even if occluded;
• although built to detect oranges, it can be easily re-trained to detect other kinds of fruits;
• outperforms humans in most cases.

All references were taken from:

https://www.ciklum.com/case-studies/seetree/

Radomyr Kostetskyi

42% of overall food orders are now placed online. The annual growth rate of online ordering and food delivery from restaurants is about 15-20% [1]. We value more convenience and oftentimes do not want to waste our valuable time on picking up meals ourselves. Therefore, we see less people visiting restaurants nowadays, but the costs of rent in shopping malls and expenditures to make their brand logos noticeable are not shrinking. Ghost kitchens come to the rescue!

What are they?

Shadow kitchens, dark kitchens, whatever you want to call them, they are the new booming trend in the Food & Beverage industry. These are food preparation facilities that stay hidden from the customers’ eyes. Set up out of sight, they cater mainly to delivery and do not serve customers directly. Their goal is to focus on making quality product cheaper and in a more efficient way.

What are the benefits?

Lower operating costs are possible thanks to a couple of factors. Choosing less obvious locations makes the rent less expensive. Neither dining area nor serving staff is needed in such a place. These elements combined save a lot of money, therefore the prices of meals can become more attractive to customers.

Not operating under a given brand and staying incognito enables them to change their menu and cook totally different food. Being so flexible is a very valuable opportunity not only for start-up restaurants that are not sure what products will sell best, but also for existing ones that try to experiment with their meal choices.

Are they flawless?

I think that they are close to perfection, but there is an issue.

If these places do not have their own app for delivery, this business model is dependent on the middlemen between the consumers and the kitchens. Being under somebody’s control may lead to toxic relationships.

Overall, I see a great potential for this trend, and I think it will successfully expand in the future.

Bibliography:

Data from:

1. The Lavu Team. “The Growth of Online Ordering and Food Delivery Is Transforming the Food Business Industry.” IPad Point of Sale System for Restaurants, Bars & More, 24 Feb. 2020, lavu.com/the-growth-of-online-ordering-and-food-delivery/.

Article I base on and present different view from them:

Hanet, Isabelle. “What Is a Dark Kitchen?” Deliverect, www.deliverect.com/blog/dark-kitchens/what-is-a-dark-kitchen.

External articles:

“Ghost Kitchen.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 13 Oct. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_kitchen.

Bromwich, Jonah Engel. “Farm to Table? More Like Ghost Kitchen to Sofa.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 24 Dec. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/12/24/style/ghost-kitchen-food-delivery.html.

Recently, investors have shown considerable interest in DeFi projects. This can be understood from the chart of total value locked (USD) in DeFi projects on the website called DeFiPulse. At the moment, the total value locked in DeFi projects almost 4 times as high as it was 90 days ago. Furthermore, the costs of some DeFi projects’ tokens on exchanges have sometimes increased even more than 10 times. For the comparison, the price of gold for the same period of time increased only 1.2 times.

As I’ve shown above, DeFi is quite popular at the moment among investors, however what is DeFi? According to the website DeFiPulse, DeFi (decentralized finance) is a complex of services based on smart contracts and decentralized applications (Dapps) that make up a decentralized financial ecosystem and provide users with access to a variety of financial services such as investing, lending, trading on exchanges, etc.

The main aim of DeFi is to change traditional financial system on new trustless blockchain-based one. At the moment, there are accessible such services as borrowing & lending, using decentralized exchanges and wallets, making payments, holding crypto-assets linked to real life assets and last, but not least, insurance.

Like everything in this world, DeFi has its pros and cons.

As regards advantages, firstly, anyone can get one or another financial service avoiding banks and their high fees. Secondly, all transactions in the blockchain are open-source for everyone. Finally, there are a plenty of ways to combine DeFi applications with existing services using unique smart contract-based protocols.

Speaking about drawbacks, firstly, since DeFi applications are still a new domain there is a chance to lose your money due to hacking of some unreliable smart contracts. Secondly, because of the little speed of transactions’ confirmation of Ethereum, on which at the moment based the vast majority of DeFi apps, the fees for confirmation sometimes really high.

In conclusion, there is no doubt that DeFi will replace the traditional financial system in the future, however, it needs some time to overcome those obstacles that hinder the development of the system now.

Sources:

What is DeFi?

https://www.coindesk.com/what-is-defi

https://academy.binance.com/en/glossary/defi

Finally after all the hype, speculation and leaks. The successor to the PS4 has arrived, sony’s long-awaited Playstation 5 is set to hit the stores in select countries such as the US and Japan markets from the 12th of November 2020 and the rest of the world will be able to get their hands on the console from the 19th. Something more unusual about the launch of the PS5 is that there’s going to be more than one console releasing this year, a digital edition of the PS5 which is essentially a streamlined digital-only console without a disc drive.

The price you may ask? Well, The PS5 and PS5 digital edition costs 499$ and 399$ respectively. Honestly if you ask me, it’s probably wise to save up and spend the extra 100$ on the standard edition with a disc drive because I think buying the digital edition is a huge commitment to Sony. Let me elaborate, so for example you buy the digital edition and you save the additional 100$ for buying your favourite game, so the only way you can purchase or gain access to a game is through the Playstation Store, there’s no other way. So you’re basically falling into “Sony’s trap” here because in case you didn’t know the Playstation Store is notorious when it comes to overpricing video games to the point where it doesn’t make sense for the consumer to even consider it. In my opinion, the most important benefit of having a disc drive in your console is the ability to swap, borrow, loan and trade physical game discs with friends and exchange stores for a fraction of the original price. Also, there are a lot of video game collectors out there who love collecting physical copies of a game to add to their exquisite collection so I’m pretty sure they won’t be the target audience for the Digital Edition.

Now for the juicy bit, the specifications. Well we’re looking at 8 cores/16 threads x86-64-AMD Ryzen Zen 2 processor which has a variable frquency upto 3.5 GHz with an AMD Radeon RDNA 2-based graphics engine which is capable of a whopping 10.3 teraflops. Both the editions of the PS5 come with an Ultra HD Blu-ray opitical drive with 3D audio, GDDR6 16GB/448GB/s bandwidth. Historically, this is the first ever Playstation console to have an inbuilt SSD(825GB).

So what does the future of gaming look like?

Well, I think the future is bright and colourful as manufacturers have finally realised the importance of implementing an inbuilt SSD which can significantly reduce game load times and provides a much smoother gaming experience. It’s definitely a step in the right direction and I see this as a permanent addition to future consoles as well. To sum up, if you’re an avid gamer without the finances to make the big jump to the top-tier PS5, then by all means go for the digital edition, it’s still a next generation console after all. But always keep in mind that there is a gray area in the digital ownership, be it music, films or games because you don’t actually own a title in perpetuity. Yes, online elements of modern games means that patches come regularly and can sometimes be required before even a game will work. But if Sony’s servers ever get taken down due to unpredictable circumstances, its not quite as reassuring to have a solely digital game collection compared to a physical one.

Sources:

https://www.millenium.gg/news/10590.html

https://www.gamesradar.com/sony-ps5-release-date-news-specs-features/

An Australian tech start-up Tiliter has a thing to brag about as it has raised $7.5 million in funding led by Investec Emerging Companies. One of the investors was also Eleanor Venture and New York’s Cornell University.

Tiliter, started in 2017, now advertises themselves as the developer of the most accurate identification software that by the use of Artificial Intelligence identify products without the need for a barcode. They are already able to recognize products with 99% accuracy in less than a second. What is impressive is that the software is able to distinguish organic from non-organic products, even though there is a little appearance difference between them. There are more advantages to barcode-less product recognition. First, there is a potential of reducing checkout time. Retailers could also limit the number of workers and therefore make cost cuts. Incorrect selections (intentional or accidental) will be removed. Also, there will be no need for packaging on which barcodes are located. I believe that user-experience will also be improved.

The software they are using is pre-trained so the is no need for a learning period. Additionally, the software has self-learning abilities and can add a new product to a database within 20 minutes. The technology is also easy to install and use.

Tiliter has also developed a Scan&Go Scale, which works on a similar principle. It is a scale that automatically recognizes items without the need of entering the name of the product manually. Afterward, a client is supposed to scan the barcode which will add products to a virtual cart. This scale is already used in a number of stores in Australia, New Zealand, and the USA.

Tiliter claims to have a price advantage over Amazon which also offers autonomous store solutions. Amazon’s cashier-less technology is called “Just Walk Out” and just started being available to other retailers. Amazon’s technology setup and installation last up to a few weeks, so there is pressure on Tiliter to develop a “plug and play” checkout technology that will be installed quickly.

As the Covid-19 pandemic is not about to leave us any sooner I believe that the founders made a good call backing Tiliter.

Sources:

https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/20/tiliter-bags-7-5m-for-its-plug-and-play-cashierless-checkout-tech/

https://www.tiliter.com/

https://www.tiliter.com/solution

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/09/amazon-is-now-selling-its-cashierless-store-technology-to-other-retailers/

https://www.itwire.com/strategy/retail-tech-startup-tiliter-raises-$7-5-million-for-european,-us-expansion.html

The term edge computing is appearing more and more often on various internet sites. What it really is? Edge computing brings data storage and processing power closer to the computer where it is most needed. It helps avoid latency problems with application efficiency, such as for the management of medical devices. Important healthcare data processing can be decentralized instead of relying on one centralized data center for improved security, quicker response and more efficient data transmission.
With edge computing, for the system to realize that a function needs to be performed, collected data doesn’t need to move back to the central server. This translates into running cost savings and decreases storage needs.

Important point is that edge computing moves computing as close to where the data is generated as possible. In retail, for example , data has traditionally been pulled together for review in one central location and then acted on. With edge computing, on the basis of information processed at the edge of individual locations, retail stores can optimize locally and in real time. Edge computing lets companies make data-driven choices more rapidly.

But can everything be that good? People want to believe it, but it doesn’t happen that way. Having analyzed some information, I can disagree with statements about the perfection of edge computing.
First of all, for projects and organizations that deal with large data storage, cloud computing is more fitting. Furthermore, in clouds, actual programming is best suited as it is usually developed for one target platform and uses one programming language. Several businesses are now making a move towards edge computing, however it is not the only option. Cloud computing remains a powerful alternative to the computing problems faced by IT developers and organizations. For a more detailed approach, they use it in combination with edge computing in certain cases.

In conclusion, each company makes its own choices, which can have a great impact on the future of this corporation. Besides, it’s very important not to ignore that something new isn’t always better than the previous one. You need to build on what is really best for your company, not the general opinion.

Links:

Edge computing could push the cloud to the fringe

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/12/23/13-ways-edge-computing-can-benefit-businesses/