Porcus

Our services were requested by an innovative B2B platform for the pig growing industry. A simple yet powerful production management tool, it connects owners, caregivers and veterinarians allowing them to track the pig growing process from start to finish and keep track of animal health concerns in real time

The Problem

Owing to its success, the platform collected a lot of data and relying solely on human intelligence to derive insight was becoming impractical. The founders’ vision and strategy entailed an adoption of AI to reduce cognitive overload on the platform subscribers and help predict mortality, provide automated treatment recommendations and diagnose animal illnesses from live and post-mortem animal photos

Our Solution

Working with the client’s executives, product managers and remote development team, we have analysed the existing dataset and explored and agreed possible solutions.

Following a consultation with the client, our team:

  1. Sourced additional location-specific data from public API sources to improve the informativeness of the existing dataset for predictive mortality analytics and anomaly detection.

  2. Fused image with non-image data types to enable separation of very similar classes in diagnosis.

  3. Designed a multistage process using proprietary models and methods to first detect/classify the context (e.g., whole pig, viscera, etc) and then disease, radically improving performance.

  4. Created an empirical taxonomy of animal disease classes and class groups.

  5. Used Natural Language Processing techniques to parse and analyse the unstructured comments text.

  6. Structured model output via JSON file for ease of integration with client’s platform and assisted the in-house development team in deploying the solution in Docker containers on Amazon AWS.

  7. Designed a continuous self-learning process to autonomously update the core AI models.

  8. Created a Telegram and Facebook chatbot, exposing the core AI functionality via Telegram and Facebook Bot API.

The Outcome

A world’s first AI Veterinarian, a novel, scalable and cost-effective solution was delivered in under 5 months. Our intelligent advisor dramatically reduced the cognitive overload on veterinarians and provided the forward-looking predictive analytics to the farmers, allowing them to act preventively to protect animal health and reduce mortality.