We love the new technologies here at MyFoodTrust, of course in relation to improving the current lack of transparency. Last week we talked to Daniel from Bext360, and their use of blockchain and AI. Today we focus on AI again, which we find super interesting as a tool for food transparency, so it was a no brainer to do a interview with Rufus from SensoMind.
Read here, how SensoMind have applied AI to create a system to detect anomalies in food products and what role AI will play in creating transparency in food supply chains in the future.
Can you start with telling us a little about yourself and SensoMind?Hi, my name is Rufus. I’ve been involved in AI ever since I studied at MIT in 2004 at their Artificial Intelligence Lab. I hold both a PhD and an MBA and have a passion for innovation management and entrepreneurship. Previously I worked a lot with perception for self-driving vehicles in agriculture. I founded Sensomind with my partner in 2016 in order to democratize AI and get it out to the masses. We’ve built our own set of tools around top AI products such as Googles Tensorflow which we thought at the time were too much targetting data scientists and not enough the engineers that are out in the field today. Our core competencies lie in analysis of complex sensor data. This is available in abundance in manufacturing so is one reason why we have gotten into this industry.
Rufus Blas
Sounds interesting, but can Sensomind’s AI technology be applied on food?
We’ve been working extensively with food manufacturing customers where our technology can be used for quality monitoring and sorting of food products. Most of our solutions are based on optical sensors (Such as cameras and multi-spectral imaging). Vision technology has been around in the food industry for 10-20 years but it’s been very difficult to apply it to food products with organic shapes and high variety. Examples include monitoring breads, meat, and fruits & vegetables. With AI you can teach the system just be showing it examples which opens up for completely new applications. An example can be automating the cutting of meat. The price of a final product has a large influence on the cutting being done correctly and it can be very difficult using traditional computer vision to recognize exactly where to cut.
And in relation to that, can Sensomind’s technology help tackle the problem of, e.g. food contamination or unapproved enhancements/additives in food?
So we have a system to detect anomalies which can for example detect contaminants. In the food industry we have used this to detect contaminants such as bone fragments, metal, plastic, and other objects which shouldn’t be there. Unlike a human operator, our system never tires. Unapproved additives is difficult to detect using traditional color cameras so here we work with spectrometers or multi-spectral cameras. Using traditional computer vision an engineer would normally sit and try to make a model for different additives based on a pre-conceived notion of what to look for. AI allows a more statistic and data-driven approach which reduces the chance of unapproved additives making it through the production undetected.
In your opinion, what role does new technologies, e.g. AI, play in creating transparency in food supply chains?
Supply chains are notoriously difficult to model because of large amounts of often poor quality or missing data. AI is really good at crunching numbers and extracting meaningful informations from poor quality and multi-source data (including images, text, numbers, etc). AI can help piece together the information about specific products which would be impossible to model by hand.
If someone was interested in learning more about the work you do, where can the find more?
The obvious thing would be to contact me. Check out our website (sensomind.com). We have a number of international projects going so location is often not a big issue.
A big thank you to Rufus, and great to hear of the use of AI in the food supply chain. Here at MyFoodTrust, we are always looking for how new technologies can enhance transparency and traceability.
So if you know of any startups, please let me know!
