Makoto Koike is a cucumber farmer in Japan. Koike is a former embedded systems designer who spent years working in the Japanese automobile industry, but in 2015 he returned home to help out on his ...

Not much about Makoto Koike’s adult life suggests that he would be a farmer. Trained as an engineer, he spent most of his career in a busy urban section of Aichi Prefecture, Japan, near the ...

Artificial intelligence in all of its forms is a truly wondrous achievement of modern technology. Given the right stimuli, an AI-based machine can learn just about anything, and a man by the name of ...

At the peak of the Japanese harvest, Makoto Koike’s mother spends around eight hours a day sorting cucumbers from the family farm into different categories—a dull, time-consuming task that her son ...

Artificial intelligence technology doesn't just have to solve grand challenges. Sometimes, it can tackle decidedly everyday problems -- like, say, improving a cucumber farm. Makoto Koike has built a ...