John Donne wrote “No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”. You could say the same for a woman.

Synergy is the magic that happens when you have a group of people passionate about the same thing and with different ways of taking action. Some start the problem solving process by doing research and for others their first step is to create a plan. Two other approaches are to begin by brainstorming lots of ideas or to use or build something tangible. There’s no right or wrong, better or worse.

So here are a few possibilities for The Pink Cow Company to move ahead with applying A.I to automate facial eczema spore identification and counting. Seek help or advice from like minded people like:

Bevan Weir, a mycologist and bacteriologist doing research at Landcare Research – Manaaki Whenua.

Connect with the people who have created an algorithm and hardware to automate the detection of Grapevine Leafroll Disease or GLD on grapevines in N.Z. VinEye, Bitwise Agronomy and Integrape Agri Automation. Dr Karmun Chool is a pathologist at Plant and Food Research.

Follow on LinkedIn Mignon Olivier Green who is General Manager of Cucumber, a local software development company.

Contact Kioumars Ghamkhar of Map and Zap. This business builds robiotic solutions for agriculture and horticulture.

A further option is to build on my existing work and improve my model. Perhaps by segmenting Pithomyces Pseudochartarum in the training and validation images. This can be done with SAM2, a foundation model that can segment anything in images and videos. This could help to increase the quality of my input images and make it easier for a Deep Learning model to learn, increasing it’s accuracy.

I could also try OCC or one class classification instead of binary classification.

Either way The Pink Cow Company will share their latest Google Colab Notebook on GitHub for others to benefit from.