Sophelen Research

In the future, I will use convoluted neural network (CNN) to create an image classifier to predict whether a plant (water spinach) is “healthy” or “spotty”. Please refer to Deep Learning with Python by Chollet for CNN.

To be honest, for a small aquaponics, such a classifier is not practical. In a commercial setting, this may be useful to quickly identify plants with “spots.” Nonetheless, creating an image classifier is a good learning experience.

Water spinach has many names. Some people call it morning glory. It Vietnam, we call it rau muống. The scientific name of water spinach is Ipomoea aquatica. Below is an image of water spinach from my garden. It’s a bit yellow as it is the end of its season.

Water spinach has been a part of Asian cuisine for a few millenniums. In Vietnam, we cook them in a variety of ways. We often would stir fry them with garlic and other condiments, or we would eat it with certain noodles such as bun bo hue. In poorer times, we would just boil it in a pot and eat with white rice and some fish sauce. Vietnamese people still do this even today because it’s simple and delicious. The boiled water from the pot would be combined with either tomatoes or lemon juice to make soup. Remind me of that scene from Ratatouille.

Water spinach has high amount of various vitamins and minerals such as Vitamin C, A, Folate, magnesium, and iron (USDA). Water spinach has been used for a variety of medical purposes; however, I will not repeat them here as I know absolutely nothing about medicine. Please refer to medicine use section on water spinach from Wikipedia to read on the purported benefits and their references.

Water spinach is incredibly resilient. It can practically survive in any aquatic environment. Just cut a piece of the stem and stick it in the mud. Within a month or two, you would have enough for a family of 100. It is incredibly invasive and can cause damage to water system, so it’s has been restricted in many states. Fortunately, the ban has been lifted in Georgia!

Because of its resiliency and uptake efficiency, water spinach has been used for phytoremediation – cleaning the environment from hazardous contaminants (Li et al. 2007). Unfortunately, it is grown in unsanitary environment throughout developing countries. This poses a health risk as water spinach is an accumulator of cadmium, lead, and mercury (Gosh 2010). Hence, water spinach is suitable for growing in a controlled environment.

In the next post, I will revisit cleaning the aquaponics data using Power BI and Data Wrangler. For the past few months, I have been fascinated with Microsoft Fabric. Big data finally unified?