Falling into AI, and the enablers called PowerAI and Brainjar

A few months ago, during my last year of engineering studies, I was handed the opportunity to start a small AI driven project. It sounded hugely interesting, so I grabbed the opportunity with both hands. At this point in time, the biology department of Vrije Universiteit Brussel was doing tests with different kind of bacteria in petri dishes (please do not ask me which or why, although they tried to explain it multiple times, I seemed to have not exactly the strongest understanding capabilities in biology). The main idea of the test was to contaminate some petri dish with a bacteria, and observe how fast new cell colonies would form, thus counting the amount of cell colonies in a petri dish. This was done by hand, counting each colony and putting a blue dot above it so they would remember which was already counted.