No time to ruminate on that because the moment has arrived, thanks to a Dutch company that has married two technologies -- motion sensors and AI -- with the aim of bringing the barnyard into the 21st century. The company, Connecterra, has brought its IDA system, or "The Intelligent Dairy Farmer's … Read more: Bovines online: Farmers are using AI to help monitor cows

Is the world ready for cows armed with artificial intelligence? No time to ruminate on that because the moment has arrived, thanks to a Dutch company that has married two technologies -- motion sensors and AI -- with the aim of bringing the barnyard into the 21st century. The company, Connecterra, has brought its IDA system, or "The Intelligent Dairy Farmer's Assistant," to the United States after having piloted it in Europe for several years. IDA uses a motion-sensing device attached to a cow's neck to transmit its movements to a program driven by AI. The sensor data, when aligned repeatedly with real-world behavior, eventually allows IDA to tell from data alone when a cow is chewing cud, lying down, walking, drinking or eating.

Underlying IDA is Google's open-source TensorFlow programming framework, which has helped spread AI to many disciplines. It's a language built on top of the commonly used Python code that helps connect data from text, images, audio or sensors to neural networks -- the algorithms that help computers learn. The language has been downloaded millions of times and has about 1,400 people contributing code, only 400 of whom work at Google, according to product manager Sandeep Gupta.