It was random, I was already working on the show as what Hollywood calls a (technical) “consultant”: advising on storylines, dialogue, background assets, etc. When this idea popped up, someone suggested we build the app for real. We took a try and ended up building the entire thing in-house with the crew, as opposed to hiring an external agency to do it for us.

Sounds like you're handling yourself even better than the characters in the show. :)

Edit: I guess it's official: The time of XKCD 1425 has passed. https://xkcd.com/1425/ September 2014; Randall undershot that by a bit :)

Ha object recognition is still far from foolproof if you ask me, but we're getting there!

If I understood correctly by reading the comments, this was built for a show ? What show ?

EDIT: ah, it's in your profile ;)

For future reference, the show is Silicon Valley.

What was your path to becoming a Hollywood technical "consultant"?

Would you write a blog post about that journey?

How long did it take you to build the app? How many devs worked on it and who got to feed the training data set?

You can fetch a dataset of 1273 labeled hot-dog images and 123287 non-hot-dog images from mscoco training dataset:

search for "hot dog" or click on the hot dog icon:

http://mscoco.org/explore/

Were the images gathered by Stanford undergrads?

I should say a lot of people made the app possible, including the show's awesome producers, writers, designers, and a lot of kind folks at HBO. To answer your question, I was the only dev on the project, and I've been working on it since last Summer, on a very part-time basis (some nights and weekends). A lot of time was spent learning Deep Learning to be honest. The last revision of the neural net was designed & trained in less than a month of nights/weekend work but obviously couldn't have been achieved without the preceding months of work — but if I was starting today knowing what I know now yeah it'd probably be about a month of work. The React Native shell around the neural net was just a few weekends worth of work — mostly it was about finding the right extensions, tuning a few things for rendering/performance, and like a whole weekend dealing with the UX around iOS permissions to access the camera & photos (lol it's seriously so complicated).

Were you able to expense the hot dogs?

In the early 90's, I had the honor of corresponding with "Uncle Frank" Webster [1], the curator of the Hot Dog Hall of Fame [2]! It boasts of more than 2,500 frankfurter items, including the Lamborweenie, a dog on wheels that "Uncle Frank" hopes some day to race against the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile [3]. Unfortunately the hot dog museum is currently closed and in (hopefully refrigerated) storage [4], otherwise the museum, gallery and gift shop would be a great place to train your app.

He asked for permission to publish in his newsletter a gif [5] of a photo I'd taken and put on my web site of the Doggie Diner head [6] on Sloat Boulevard in San Francisco [7]. (This was years before John Law acquired all the Doggie Diner heads he could find for his restoration project [8], so there weren't so many photos on them on the internet at the time.)

Of course I gave him permission because he asked so politely, and although at first he seemed a little creepy, I could tell he was authentic and sincere since he signed his correspondence: "With Relish, Uncle Frank." [9] And he even delivered on his promise to send me copies of his newsletter!

He enthusiastically informed me that the highest quality hot dogs he's ever found are from Top Dog in Berkeley [10]. He admitted that he went through their dumpster to find out where they sourced them from because they wouldn't tell him, and he vouches that they are made from the finest possible ingredients. I agree with Uncle Frank that Top Dog has really excellent hot dogs (ask for them cooked butterfly style), and I take him at his word that they come from a reputable source. You can now actually order them online [11] if you would prefer not to go through their dumpster.

[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/hot-dogs-are-us-6...

[2] http://thehotdoghalloffame.blogspot.nl/

[3] https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-19007874/the-almost-all...

[4] http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/20747

[5] http://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/DoggieDiner.gif

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggie_Diner

[7] http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/14441

[8] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2118888480/doggie-diner...

[9] http://www.downtownmakeover.com/comments.asp?CZID=17

[10] https://www.yelp.com/biz/top-dog-berkeley

[11] http://www.topdoghotdogs.com/mailorder.html