Lobe aims to make it easy for anyone to train machine learning models

Sean Cusack has been a backyard beekeeper for 10 years and a tinkerer for longer. That's how he and an entomologist friend got talking about building an early warning system to alert hive owners to potentially catastrophic threats. They envisioned installing a motion-sensor-activated camera at a beehive entrance and using machine learning to remotely identify when invaders like mites or wasps or potentially even the Asian giant hornet were getting in. "A threat like that could kill your hive in a couple of hours, and it'd be game over," Cusack said. "But had you known within 10 minutes of it happening and could get out there and get involved, you could potentially rescue whole colonies."