• Tech News
    • Games
    • Pc & Laptop
    • Mobile Tech
    • Ar & Vr
    • Security
  • Startup
    • Fintech
  • Reviews
  • How To
What's Hot

Elementor #32036

January 24, 2025

The Redmi Note 13 is a bigger downgrade compared to the 5G model than you might think

April 18, 2024

Xiaomi Redmi Watch 4 is a budget smartwatch with a premium look and feel

April 16, 2024
Facebook Twitter Instagram
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest VKontakte
Behind The ScreenBehind The Screen
  • Tech News
    1. Games
    2. Pc & Laptop
    3. Mobile Tech
    4. Ar & Vr
    5. Security
    6. View All

    Bring Elden Ring to the table with the upcoming board game adaptation

    September 19, 2022

    ONI: Road to be the Mightiest Oni reveals its opening movie

    September 19, 2022

    GTA 6 images and footage allegedly leak

    September 19, 2022

    Wild west adventure Card Cowboy turns cards into weird and silly stories

    September 18, 2022

    7 Reasons Why You Should Study PHP Programming Language

    October 19, 2022

    Logitech MX Master 3S and MX Keys Combo for Business Gen 2 Review

    October 9, 2022

    Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen10 Review

    September 18, 2022

    Lenovo IdeaPad 5i Chromebook, 16-inch+120Hz

    September 3, 2022

    It’s 2023 and Spotify Still Can’t Say When AirPlay 2 Support Will Arrive

    April 4, 2023

    YouTube adds very convenient iPhone homescreen widgets

    October 15, 2022

    Google finishes iOS 16 Lock Screen widgets rollout w/ Maps

    October 14, 2022

    Is Apple actually turning iMessage into AIM or is this sketchy redesign rumor for laughs?

    October 14, 2022

    MeetKai launches AI-powered metaverse, starting with a billboard in Times Square

    August 10, 2022

    The DeanBeat: RP1 simulates putting 4,000 people together in a single metaverse plaza

    August 10, 2022

    Improving the customer experience with virtual and augmented reality

    August 10, 2022

    Why the metaverse won’t fall to Clubhouse’s fate

    August 10, 2022

    How Apple privacy changes have forced social media marketing to evolve

    October 16, 2022

    Microsoft Patch Tuesday October Fixed 85 Vulnerabilities – Latest Hacking News

    October 16, 2022

    Decentralization and KYC compliance: Critical concepts in sovereign policy

    October 15, 2022

    What Thoma Bravo’s latest acquisition reveals about identity management

    October 14, 2022

    What is a Service Robot? The vision of an intelligent service application is possible.

    November 7, 2022

    Tom Brady just chucked another Microsoft Surface tablet

    September 18, 2022

    The best AIO coolers for your PC in 2022

    September 18, 2022

    YC’s Michael Seibel clarifies some misconceptions about the accelerator • DailyTech

    September 18, 2022
  • Startup
    • Fintech
  • Reviews
  • How To
Behind The ScreenBehind The Screen
Home»Startup»How a former Microsoft researcher used AI to grow award-winning lettuce from 5,000 miles away – Startup
Startup

How a former Microsoft researcher used AI to grow award-winning lettuce from 5,000 miles away – Startup

August 26, 2022No Comments5 Mins Read
Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
How a former Microsoft researcher used AI to grow award-winning lettuce from 5,000 miles away – GeekWire
Share
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email
Koidra’s Chief Business Officer Soojung Smith (left) and Kenneth Tran, founder, CEO and chief technology officer, outside of their Seattle WeWork office. (Startup Photo / Lisa Stiffler)

It’s pretty impressive to grow award-winning lettuce in a greenhouse competition against 42 teams from nearly two dozens countries. It’s even more remarkable when you do it from 5,000 miles away.

Koidra, a Seattle-based “AI of things” startup, this summer won the international Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge — its second time claiming the title. The contest was held at the Netherlands’ Wageningen University & Research — perhaps the world’s top institution for greenhouse food production.

Add to all of that the fact that Koidra founder Kenneth Tran is new to farming and food production. Frankly, he can seem a little ambivalent about it.

“I came to agriculture really from the technology and industrial control standpoint,” said Tran, who is Koidra’s CEO and chief technology officer.

While not an ardent green thumb, Tran knows the technology piece in spades. He has degrees in math and computer science. His previous job was principal applied scientist for Microsoft Research for more than seven years. His passion is for reinforcement learning, or RL, which is a subdomain of machine learning. Reinforcement learning, he explained, is about real-time decision making and optimization, whereas most of ML is classification and prediction.

“I believe [reinforcement learning] is the new frontier of AI,” Tran said.

At Koidra, Tran is applying reinforcement learning to industrial processes, with an initial focus on agriculture. Using this sort of machine learning can increase the volume of food produced while reducing the use of water, fertilizers and pesticides, according to the company.

RGB images helped the Koidra team remotely monitor the weight and growth of the lettuce in real time. (Koidra Photo)

These are critical benefits. Improving indoor farming may be essential in responding to and reducing climate change. Hotter temperatures and more extreme weather events are already taking a toll on outdoor agriculture in many places. And agriculture is a significant carbon contributor: including livestock production, agriculture generates between 19-29% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

See also  Seattle startup Xembly raises $15M for AI 'chief of staff' that automates tedious conversational tasks – Startup

Agtech is an increasingly ripe field. Investors spent $10.5 billion on agtech deals worldwide last year, according to PitchBook, setting a new record for the sector. In the first quarter of this year, agtech companies raised $3.3 billion.

In the four-month-long Netherlands contest, the Koidra team used its software to remotely adjust greenhouse parameters such as lighting, ventilation, heating, irrigation, fogging and blackout screens. Various monitors provided feedback on the greenhouse conditions. RGB (red, green, blue) images of the lettuce gave insights into its weight and growth in real time, while thermal images revealed the veggies’ rate of water loss through transpiration.

Tran found his way to greenhouses through Microsoft Research. While employed by the tech powerhouse in Redmond, Wash., Tran mentored teams figuring out how to optimize the energy efficiency of Microsoft data centers and forecast their power use needs.

“It’s such an impactful problem to solve. It’s not just some fancy tech problem, it solves basic needs.”

He enjoyed the projects, but wasn’t easily able to experiment with data center operations, given that they must always work reliably.

Then he noticed the indoor vertical farm growing in a Microsoft building’s cafe.

“That got me curious,” Tran said. “I got hooked into the problem of indoor farming. It’s a research friendly project.”

To get started in the sector, he consulted with agriculture experts from North America to understand plant biology and indoor farming. That included researchers at Oregon State University, Cornell University and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the country’s federal ag department.

See also  We Put Google’s New AI Writing Assistant to the Test

While the ML problem solving drives him, Tran does appreciate the importance of food production.

“It’s such an impactful problem to solve,” he said. “It’s not just some fancy tech problem, it solves basic needs.”

Tran participated in the first international greenhouse competition in 2018 on a Microsoft team. They won with their superior cucumbers, beating out competitors from Tencent, Intel and elsewhere.

Thermal images give a sense of transpiration, or water loss, from the lettuce. The orange dot is a plastic ball that’s used as a reference as it doesn’t undergo transpiration and is always hotter than the plants. (Koidra Photo)

In 2020, Tran left Microsoft to form Koidra. The next year the startup entered the contest on its own and won with its lettuce, winning again this year.

The company has grown to 25 employees and recently hired Chief Business Officer Soojung Smith, a serial entrepreneur and former Microsoft exec.

Fellow Seattle startup Phaidra works in a similar industry, using AI to control industrial processes. Its focus has been on energy use and heating and cooling of businesses such as data centers, refineries, pharmaceutical plants and steel mills.

Koidra has about 10 customers of its greenhouse software. That includes British Columbia’s Winset Farms, which provides produce for Costco, and Montana’s Local Bounti. The startup raised a $4.5 million seed round earlier this year.

It has offices in Seattle and Vietnam, where Tran’s family lives. Koidra plans to build a greenhouse in Vietnam, which is a more affordable option than the U.S., Tran said. He is also a co-founder of Ayo Biomass, a woody-biomass fuel manufacturer based in Vietnam.



Source link

awardwinning grow lettuce Microsoft Miles researcher Startup
Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email

Related Posts

Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3 review

October 26, 2023

Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 review

October 13, 2023

Multiple Milestones As New Majority Capital Boosts Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition

September 26, 2023

Getty Images Plunges Into the Generative AI Pool

September 26, 2023
Add A Comment

Comments are closed.

Editors Picks

Viral phrase recreation Wordle is being became a board recreation

July 17, 2022

‘Blacktop Hoops’ is Like ‘NBA Road’ in VR, Coming to Quest 2 & PC VR Subsequent 12 months – Highway to VR

July 19, 2022

NZXT are making gaming screens now, they usually’re lookin’ sharp

July 19, 2022

Epson Ecotank ET-8500 review

July 5, 2023

Subscribe to Updates

Get the latest news and Updates from Behind The Scene about Tech, Startup and more.

Top Post

Elementor #32036

The Redmi Note 13 is a bigger downgrade compared to the 5G model than you might think

Xiaomi Redmi Watch 4 is a budget smartwatch with a premium look and feel

Behind The Screen
Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest Vimeo YouTube
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
© 2025 behindthescreen.uk - All rights reserved.

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.