from Hacker News

The Pastry A.I. That Learned to Fight Cancer

by jsomers on 3/25/21, 11:22 PM with 19 comments

• by joe_the_user on 3/27/21, 10:55 PM

  Wow,

  It's weird to have what seems (I repeat, seems) like pretty a big deal technically be first described in a meandering New Yorker article.

  This is a more-or-less hand-tune system apparently effectively competing with deep learning systems (identifying cancer is far from easy and not solved by deep learning at this point). As the article says, by being person-created, the system has obvious advantage in both explainability and users being able to understand it's mistakes.

  Of course, a broader look from experts is in order but I can't see this as a strong demonstration of an alternative paradigm. Now, the challenge is to automate the construction of systems of this sort.

  And I can find little-to-no information about this, except in Japanese.

• by wizzwizz4 on 3/27/21, 8:36 PM

  I like the traditional approach. Training a brain to solve a problem is all well and good, but with a BakeryScan-like system, you can see why, and change it if necessary. It's engineering, rather than statistics.

• by avibhu on 3/27/21, 11:22 PM

  Are there any good resources for learning more classical computer vision? How would someone approach a problem like this without using machine learning?

• by phenkdo on 3/28/21, 1:22 PM

  This doesn't describe what traditional CV approach this uses, presumably descriptor based ones: A-KAZE, SIFT etc. do work well for such scenarios. So both Deep learning and traditional machine vision have their place.

• by sleepy_keita on 3/28/21, 2:44 AM

  The local bakery had this system put in a year or so ago, and I was hopeful they'd finally use it to accept payments other than just cash... Unfortunately not.