Week 1: In the beginning…

It’s true. When the student is ready the teacher appears. I’d “failed” again. I had ventured down the E-Commerce path, dreaming of fame and fortune, only to realize that doing it with a shop centered on French Bulldogs wasn’t going to get me there. Sure I could keep faking it but I knew deep down that it was time to pivot….once again. I expect you’ve hit roadblocks like that too. Yes, I’d got a few sales but not enough to cover costs or more importantly to motivate me to keep going. The people in your chosen pond know when you’re pretending to be someone you’re not. What was I thinking? Then I remembered Buckminster Fuller and the magic of precession. A honey bee while searching for nectar to take back to the hive unknowingly pollinates flowers in the process. Putting in time, money and energy to build an e-commerce store became my goal. But the confidence I gained and the experience of learning a new skill were just as valuable. We can take them to use in our future projects. Nothing is wasted.

Have you read “The Price of Tomorrow” by Jeff Booth? It’s one of the books that got me inspired on my Data Science and Machine Learning journey. I ‘discovered’ Jeff listening to The Rich Dad Radio Show one night. I read about all the progress that was being made in Human Health. How Machine Learning models could be used to diagnose malignant breast cancer from mammograms with an accuracy as good as a general radiologist. My friends Annette, Cheryl and Jan had all succumbed to this type of cancer.

And simultaneously it seemed, Emirates Team NZ were getting ready to defend the Americas Cup here in N.Z. They had built a simulator to make boat design iterations faster and without risking doing major damage to the boat or the crew. But to accelerate the process even more someone had the idea of building an A.I. bot or algorithm that could ‘play’ the simulator 24/7 without getting tired. Not only that, the program learned and got better as time went on. That’s when the sailors got interested. The bot was teaching them. It was coming up with actions that they had never thought of before. These were actions or techniques that might not win the every race but would win them the long term goal. Winning the America’s Cup!! AND SO THEY DID. I like winning too and I wanted to find out if I could apply this type of process in veterinary science on dairy farms. To give the cows and the farmers a competitive edge. Keep them alive and productive for longer.

So here I am more than three quarter of the way through a course created by the guys at ZTM …Daniel O’Bourke and Andrei Neagoie. I’m not sure how I came to find these teachers but I’m so glad I did. Like I said at the start …when the student is ready the teacher or mentor appears, as if by magic! It’s time to start my first 6 week project. I’m going to take pictures of facial eczema spores…and things that look like them…using a video camera attached to a Trinocular Biological Microscope. By connecting the camera to my laptop I can save these images and use them to train a Deep Learning Model. That’s the first step. Then I can test it with images the model hasn’t seen and measure how well it does. How well it classifies correctly. Yes, this is a Pithomyces Chartarum spore or no it’s not. It’s something else.

Long term this small project could lead to a bigger one. I could build a small app that can identify correctly spores washed from a sample of ryegrass/clover pasture. Here goes…….

Education by choice, with it’s marvelous motivating pyschology of desire for truth, will make life ever cleaner and happier, more rhythmical and artistic

Buckminster Fuller