Amazon AI used to keep murderous pussy at bay

Killer cats kept at bay with a little bit of AI help

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PICTURE THE SCENE: you're getting hot and steamy with your partner when a small mammalian serial killer - aka your cat - leaps up on the bed to deposit a dead or heavily mauled creature on your duvet.

If you can see yourself wanting to, erm, plough on, then bravo (also maybe seek therapy). If you'd stop and scream 'gah Mr Tiddles, that's a mood-killer', then you're in the same ballpark as Amazon employee Ben Hamm.

At the Amazon Ignite conference in Seattle, Hamm told attendees about his cat Metric and the feline's habit of bringing in various dead or half-dead rodents - the latter which Hamm had to euthanise - which at one point "brought an immediate and upsetting end to sex".

Hamm decided that such pussy-related pseudo-cock-blocking was getting a bit too much. But he noted he couldn't put an anti-hunting collar on his cat and was "way too neurotic" to lock Metric out of the house at night. He also said that the cat near-exclusively defecates outside and that's not a talent he wanted to see "go to waste".

So what does an Amazon employee do in such a situation? Why he turns to artificial intelligence tech of course.

Starting with an Arduino electronics kit, Hamm attached it to a lock and then connected an Amazon DeepLens video camera, designed for use in machine learning training, to the setup.

Then using Amazon's Sagemaker toolset, he used supervised training to train an image recognition system to detect when the cat was approaching the cat flap with a dead animal in its mouth.

Once trained on more than 23,000 labelled photos of the cat coming and going, the AI cat would lock the murderous moggy out of the house of 15 minutes if it was carrying prey in its gob. It also takes pics of the cat and sends them to Hamm, for reasons unknown, as well as donate "blood money" to the Audubon animal society.

While Hamm said the system isn't perfect, out of five weeks of running it's only locked Metric out unfairly one time. Quite the result.