Founded in 2019, AI Farming is committed to integrating AI and automation technologies into comprehensive aquaculture solutions that increase the yield and quality of aquatic products while reducing their cost. The company operates crab aquafarms in the Yuen Long District in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area, where they test digital technologies in aquaculture.
The company's signature offering is AIACHFS - an AI Automated Crab Farming System. They have introduced AI image recognition and automated device control technologies for more refined and intelligent crab farming, improving yields of molting and soft-shell crabs.
Liu Wai-man, CEO and founder of the company, is also the owner of the Hee Kee Crab General restaurant.
Transitioning from a restaurant to a digital startup providing intelligent aquaculture solutions, AI Farming needs to integrate various complex systems for their AIACHFS, including those for automated robot design and assembling, data collection, management, and modeling, IoT sensing, AI image recognition and object model training and inference.
However, AI involves a full technology stack from chips, storage, network, distributed computing, computing frameworks, feature engineering, and machine learning algorithms. The complexity of this stack results in a steep learning curve, making the adoption of AI both costly and time-consuming. AI Farming has struggled to develop an efficient, easy-to-manage AI system. Huawei Cloud provides ModelArts, a one-stop and easy-to-use AI development pipeline, which covers the entire process of AI model development. ModelArts provides functions such as data processing.
AI Farming uses Huawei Cloud ModelArts to create a model that predicts when crabs will molt and improves the farming of soft-shell crabs. These crabs have a narrow window of opportunity for harvesting, as their shells harden within four hours of molting. ModelArts data analysis enables crabs to hibernate under certain temperature and humidity conditions. This allows soft-shell crabs to be preserved for up to seven days. The crabs' meat quality, nutrition, and yield are significantly improved.
Huawei Cloud ModelArts technologies are not only advancing the AI era, but also revitalizing the traditional food industry with every plate of fried crab from Hee Kee Fried Crab.