
What Happened When We Took the SCiO Food Analyzer Grocery Shopping - teklaperry
http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/start-ups/israeli-startup-consumer-physics-says-its-scio-food-analyzer-is-finally-ready-for-prime-timeso-we-took-it-grocery-shopping
======
xkcd-sucks
A few problems with scio:

\- It uses machine learning models on 10-datapoint IR reflectance spectra,
meaning it's only useful in a trained regime. It doesn't give information
about composition, but instead classifies a sample as a member of a pretty
constrained population. So a mystery substance that can't be roughly
identified ('vegetable', 'pill' etc) can't be scanned, etc.

\- So, evaluating drugs ("we can distinguish fake from real viagra") is done
by looking at the surface coating which typically has no active ingredients
(and even if there were, the signal would be washed out by inactive
ingredients). The model is basically trained on 10-100 scans of a presumed
good viagra pill, or maybe 10-100 different good viagra pills if they felt
like it

\- Building models requires purchase of a $250 license in addition to the $250
hardware, which is just ridiculous. Of course they're doing the calculations
on their servers, but it still seems really scammy, hostile to developers, and
counterproductive to launching an ecosystem of scanning models. The useless
10-point IR "spectra" notwithstanding, I would totally buy one of these if you
could use open data and open models supported by a public community

