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A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

countthings.com

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Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#71

Post by morsanu »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #65
morsanu wrote: post #14

Hi, there! I'm one of the project managers at CountThings, I'll try to respond to comments here but I guess you can AMA.

I just wanted to say that if you can count particles of things in microscope images, you can probably make great inroads at companies that do drug testing, like Covance or PPD in America. They're paying chemists to circle blobs on paper and count them. I bet they'd even appreciate someone to count their circles!

Thanks for the idea. Getting the app in front of companies that need it is one of our challenges.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#72

Post by dumb1224 »

morsanu wrote: post #54
zerovar wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a very naïve question but, how did you know/find out that an app to count things could be a profitable business?

No, it's actually a pretty good question. We are a custom ML & computer vision software company and about 7 years ago we got several requests in a short time period for counting items in images. We thought it was a great idea for a product and kind of started our journey as an internal startup.

Depends on the industry as well. Cell counting is a huge part of life science research and it's a well established business in lab-based pipelines (integral part of commercial solutions). However if you try to enter the realm of clinical field such as histology and pathology assistive technology it suddenly becomes tricky. Same with innovative diagnostic tools. You need clinical trials for those.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#73

Post by cinntaile »

morsanu wrote: post #52
MathYouF wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bet is they just invested a few months making a varied dataset, a few grand on mturk using labelme, some image augmentation, a few engineering tricks for a nice UX,some strategies for getting the model to converge on tricky test images, and got it to hit 100% accuracy fairly quickly.

We are working on this product in-house for 7 years now. We are an internal startup from a company that does custom computer vision and ML software. No mturk, no tricks, a lot of work in ML and in UX as it is not a very straightforward task.

For some reason it's very common here on HN to trivialize the difficulty of automating tasks. But you're not new here so you probably are familiar with it!

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#74

Post by distribot »

temporalparts wrote: post #6

Wow, this is such a simple application of ML and it is incredibly valuable. On their website, they charge $100/month per device or $1000/year per device [0] and I bet they're making a killing. [0] https://countthings.com/en/

I wish I could get a bead on how useful ML is. Hackernews makes me think it’s all hype.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#75

Post by gield »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #65
morsanu wrote: post #14

Hi, there! I'm one of the project managers at CountThings, I'll try to respond to comments here but I guess you can AMA.

I just wanted to say that if you can count particles of things in microscope images, you can probably make great inroads at companies that do drug testing, like Covance or PPD in America. They're paying chemists to circle blobs on paper and count them. I bet they'd even appreciate someone to count their circles!

The company I work at did a project like this where the goal was counting of different types of bacterial colony forming units (CFUs) that were cultured in Petri dishes [0]. We presented our results at ESANN [1].

[0] https://radix.ai/cases/gsk-vaccine-development

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.05337

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#76

Post by rubenbe »

temporalparts wrote: post #6

Wow, this is such a simple application of ML and it is incredibly valuable. On their website, they charge $100/month per device or $1000/year per device [0] and I bet they're making a killing. [0] https://countthings.com/en/

Value pricing at it's finest. If the customer saves $1000/month per device, they'll happily pay the $100/month. As it still saves them $900. They don't care how complex/simple the ML implementation is.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#77

Post by fimdomeio »

Humans on the other hand are really good at looking at patterns. I imagine a tray with some recesses that would receive the pearls after a bit of shaking or a funnel that would put all the pearls in a line and then somehow group them/count them should not be that hard to do.

And yes outsourcing this to someone else and employing machine learning apparently also works.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#78

Post by sneak »

distribot wrote: post #74
temporalparts wrote: post #6

Wow, this is such a simple application of ML and it is incredibly valuable. On their website, they charge $100/month per device or $1000/year per device [0] and I bet they're making a killing. [0] https://countthings.com/en/

I wish I could get a bead on how useful ML is. Hackernews makes me think it’s all hype.

Sometimes I feel like the whole ML scene is just stringing me along.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#80

Post by imtringued »

sellyme wrote: post #19
notimetorelax wrote: post #7

To counter other’s points on pricing - in the end it’s a question of utility vs price. 1k$ per year to cut time to count by 80% may be a great deal to many.

Of course, but $100 per year to do the same is an even better deal. I can only assume that their support for custom requests is absolutely incredible, because it should be pretty trivial for any potential competitor to put up a similar concept for a tenth of the price and still be making a profit. But that's always the case with enterprise software I suppose. The improvement from 98% to 100% "quality" (whatever that…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27262146

Replicating that dataset will cost you $10000 just to take the photos.

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