AI's Grocery Games🛒 [HTC #34]
"Paper or Plastic?" - The AI Cashier
Hello, World!
Welcome to our 34th edition of Hold the Code (and our last edition for the Winter 2022 season). We’ve had an amazing season thanks to all of our new and returning subscribers. In our finale edition, we talk about how AI is saving the Earth and changing our grocery stores. Our Weekly Feature highlights a novel museum exhibit of a completely AI-generated religion.
For the NU students who are participating in our ice cream challenge, stay tuned until the end of the newsletter to see if your were one of our lucky winners! 🍦
Happy reading!
What does the whale say?
At Hold the Code, we are often AI skeptics, presenting the potential negative implications of certain applications of AI technology. However, today we decided to switch things up, starting with an exploration of five ways AI is actually saving wildlife:
Preventing poaching: Covering over 22,400 sq km, it takes a lot of effort to stop poaching in Zambia’s Kaufe national park. Here, rangers use AI to track boats entering and leaving the park. This helps to increase security without needing large teams of rangers to monitor every vulnerability.
Monitoring water supplies: In Brazil, AI has helped to reveal the water loss that has occurred over the past 30 years as deforestation, development, and climate change continue to affect this region. Using machine learning, scientists were able to measure the extent of this crisis, discovering that the Pantanal (the largest tropical wetland in the world) had lost 74% of its surface water.
Whale watching (…or listening?): To protect the whales, you first need to know where the whales are. Google AI for Social Good partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association to train an ML model on roughly 190,000 hours of acoustic recordings to help identify whale vocalizations, a task that would have been almost impossible to do manually.
Counting koalas: In Australia, researchers at the Queensland University of Technology are using AI and infrared imaging to count the koala population. The AI is trained to recognize if a heat signature from an infrared camera belongs to a koala or not.
Species ID-ing: In addition to counting koalas in Australia, AI is also helping out in the Congo basin, where many species are dangerously close to extinction. This AI uses image classification to determine which species are present in a given area, and it can classify up to 3,000 images per hour at a 96% accuracy rate.
While we may be critical of some of the ethics surrounding AI, we are totally on board to use AI to #SaveTheEarth.
Grocery Stores of the Future
Cash-less Crops
What if you could go into a store, pick something off the shelf, and just leave? Imagine a world without going to a cashier or inserting your debit card into that little scanner and typing in your pin, you could be automatically charged as soon as you exited the premises! Imagine not having to go through the long and arduous process of checking out! Well, that reality is not too far off!
The Ginger Market
This wild, futuristic tale is playing out on the campus of San Jose University, at the Ginger Market. This is how the check-out process works:
Computers track shoppers’ positions: Cameras and sensors that are mounted throughout the store keep track of the people within the store. There is no facial recognition involved — in order to protect the privacy of shoppers — so the computers behind the scenes use triangulation (using three cameras with set distances to figure out measurements) to follow the positions of the customers.
AI tracks purchases: Then, the AI records when people have taken items off of the shelves. As of now, the algorithm has a 95% success rate.
Customers are charged: Finally, within an hour of leaving The Ginger Market, shoppers receive a digital receipt of their purchases. No hassle at all!
Your Local, Friendly Autonomous Retail Store
There have been more and more of these kinds of stores opening up around the US. Basing purchases off of the movements of customers instead of items scanned during the checkout process seems to be taking off — Amazon was one of the first companies to try something like this, and their stores are popping up everywhere.
“You can see people, who don’t believe their eyes,” said Professor Ahmed Banafa, an expert in AI at San Jose University. “‘I’m going there, grabbing stuff, and leaving. Nobody is questioning me!’”
Is it hoverboards? No, not really. Is it flying cars? Maybe not. But it definitely is cool.
Weekly Feature: All Hail The Word
Two Seattle based artists Jacob Fennel and Reilly Donovan set out to explore the question: how do we take cues from our surroundings that ultimately change the way we perceive reality? To do so, they are using AI to look at something that hits very close to home for many people: religion.
“The root idea was about how religion has been a force of civilization — almost like a technology that has defined some of the ways we perceive things” says Fennell.
So what is it?
As you walk into the gallery of Seattle’s Museum of Museums, you’re greeted by a church-like atmosphere, with pews lining the aisles and stained-glass windows projected on the walls. Over the loudspeakers, a Gregorian chant is broadcasted in a friendly yet commanding voice while at the back, a small stack of pocket sized pamphlets. None of these pieces of media, the chant, the words, even the stained glass, ever actually existed as human created pieces of media. They were all generated by The Word of the Future, a neural network trained on religious texts and content as well as more fringe writings, including philosophy of the mind, computer and cognitive science, and philosophic musings.
As you get further into the exhibit, the material gets more focused. As you enter one room, a dim chapel where you hear The Word deliver a sermon, it lectures you on the intersections between learning and technology. Further through the three rooms, the sermon turns more intimate, talking about seeing meaning in randomness.
Overall, the beauty of the installation is not just in its existence, but in its continued growth. As The Word continues to exist and interact with the world throughout its lifespan, it will continue to learn not just about religion, but how to build religion.
So what does it mean?
Fennel and Donovan are using this exhibit to explore how religion historically has played a technology-like role in how we perceive the unexplainable. And furthermore, how technology has begun to adapt to take its place.
As Fennel explains, “[P]eople attribute things they don’t understand to forces they can understand. They try to make sense of things.”
Just as that power used to be religion, people are now able to attribute such things to technologies, creating an intertwining of the two forces. As this intertwining gets stronger, the subconscious messages we receive that help explain the world around us shift, and the world we are swimming through changes without us even noticing.
And the winner is…🍦
Thank you to everyone who participated in our ice cream challenge on NU’s campus over the past few weeks. We had over 100 participants, of which 12 players guessed both AI-generated flavors correctly. From this winners pool, we randomly selected our two winners: Jamie Park and Leyun Feng! Congratulations!
But it’s not about winning, it’s about having fun…right? Okay, maybe it’s about winning a little bit, but we wanted to share some of the funniest and most creative responses we got as well.
Most creative responses for ice cream cone #1
Steak as well (from Patrick Reyna)
SNOWY AS HELL (from Timothy Fu)
sugar ‘n zeal (from Peter Ha)
Most creative responses for ice cream cone #2
Bodacious Moonlight Tart (from Hisham Ahmad)
Beautiful flowingly mint (from Charlotte Jones)
beautiful chocolate coat (from Jinhee Heo)
Thank you again to all of our participants! We are so excited to welcome all of you to the Hold the Code family. If you have any further questions about our ice cream challenge, please contact ianlei2025@u.northwestern.edu.
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Written by Molly Pribble, Hope McKnight, and Arielle Michelman
Edited by Molly Pribble