If someone told me, a couple of weeks prior, that I would be taking pictures of everything that crossed my path, I would have laughed in their face. But there I was, sitting on the sidewalk, looking to capture the perfect shot that would allow me to learn a little more about the world I am a part of: the expression of the guide dog who is always by my side; the bustle of a busy street full of buildings, cars, and signs; the box of desserts I just bought, wondering whether it looked appetizing enough to bring to a family dinner. I can't see these things, which are so easy to take for granted, with my own eyes. But A.I. has now brought me as close to being able to do so as I'll probably ever be. I was born totally blind, and my visual world has always been determined by what well-meaning people can tell me about my surroundings. To appreciate all the details of a room or to read a menu in a restaurant, I was dependent on someone else.

Recently, I was asked the question: "Why did you decide to learn Data Science?" The first things that came to mind were events like teaching myself Python during the downtime of my old security job, writing Python scripts to input and display company traveler data on a flight-map, or just how much fun I had making reports on which doors were used most frequently at my work building. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that these were contributing factors to my decision to study Data Science, not the primary reason. The primary reason comes from a story that has stuck with me since I first heard it. In 2007 Japanese tech company Brain Co. Ltd. had seen moderate success selling software to big companies.

Scanning a tissue sample for cancer cells is a painstakingly time consuming process. A pathologist has to look over the sample slide in a microscope, checking each cell to see if there is an abnormality. However, a surprising Japanese artificial intelligence (AI) machine called BakeryScan that identifies bakery items has come to the rescue. According to an article reported in The New Yorker, a doctor once walked into a Tokyo bakery in 2019. There, he saw a multitude of pastry items he could choose from and got excited. But it was the checkout process that impressed him the most.

One morning in the spring of 2019, I entered a pastry shop in the Ueno train station, in Tokyo. After taking a tray and tongs at the front, you browsed, plucking what you liked from heaps of baked goods. What first struck me was the selection, which seemed endless: there were croissants, turnovers, Danishes, pies, cakes, and open-faced sandwiches piled up everywhere, sometimes in dozens of varieties. But I was most surprised when I got to the register. At the urging of an attendant, I slid my items onto a glowing rectangle on the counter. A nearby screen displayed an image, shot from above, of my doughnuts and Danish.

I'm going to tell you what it takes to be a 10x data scientist. What is a 10x data scientist? Someone who runs ten times as many experiments as the average data scientist. Data scientists do other things, too: data munging, analysis, and writing implementations of machine learning algorithms for production. But experiments are what defines a data scientist.

Faces are far from the only thing artificial intelligence researchers want computers to recognize. One Japanese tech company has created an AI-powered camera system, called BakeryScan, that is able to recognize different types of breads and pastries. Developed by Japanese tech and media firm Brain Co., the scanning tools are currently installed in more than 400 retail locations across Japan. One of the technology's biggest clients is the Andersen Group, a chain of high-end Danish-inspired bakeries that operate across Japan, according to a report from The Asahi Shimbun. BakeryScan works through a camera that's mounted above a backlit checkout tray.