Growing award-winning lettuce from 5,000 miles away

Koidra, a Seattle-based "AI of things" startup, this summer won the international Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge — its second time claiming the title. The contest was held at the Netherlands' Wageningen University & Research — perhaps the world's top institution for greenhouse food production.

Add to all of that the fact that Koidra founder Kenneth Tran is new to farming and food production. Frankly, he can seem a little ambivalent about it.

"I came to agriculture really from the technology and industrial control standpoint," said Tran, who is Koidra's CEO and chief technology officer.

While not an ardent green thumb, Tran knows the technology piece in spades. He has degrees in math and computer science. His previous job was principal applied scientist for Microsoft Research for more than seven years. His passion is for reinforcement learning, or RL, which is a subdomain of machine learning. Reinforcement learning, he explained, is about real-time decision making and optimization, whereas most of ML is classification and prediction.

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Source: msn