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Down on the Farm

In fact, as the Wall St. Journal noted recently, face recognition for animals is actually pretty difficult. As they put it, "It’s not like you can tell a donkey to stand still". Quite. Nevertheless it can be done. I was privileged to have Dr. X X from JD Digits, a subsidiary of JD (China’s largest e-commerce business) on my panel about AI ethics and governance at the Innovate Finance Global Summit (IFGS) 2019. This was a great panel, by the way, largely because the well-informed panellists took the discussion in interesting directions. Anyway JD Digits, amongst other things, runs face recognition services for farmyard animals such as cows and pigs. It turns out that pig face recognition is a big business, There are 700m pigs in China, the productivity gains that farmers can obtain from ensuring that each pig is fed optimally, that sick pigs are kept away from the herd (and so on) are very significant.

(Apparently the face recognition system also goes some way to reigning in wannabe Napoleons, as Dr. X explained that there are some “bully pigs” that try to obtain a disproportionate share of barnyard resources. The system can spot them chowing down when they shouldn’t be and flag for intervention.)

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