Machine learning can be an incredible addition to any tinkerer’s toolbox, helping to fix that little problem in life that no commercial gadget can handle. For Amazon product manager Ben Hamm, that problem was stopping his “sweet, murderous cat” Metric from bringing home dead and half-dead prey in the middle of the night and waking him up.
Hamm gave an entertaining presentation on this subject at Ignite Seattle (which we saw via Synced) and you can watch a video of his talk above. In short, in order to stop Metric from following his instincts, Hamm hooked up the cat flap in his door to an AI-enabled camera (Amazon’s own DeepLens) and an Arduino-powered locking system.
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