Tag: food

Digital Gastronomy

The Virtuoso Mixer, The Robotic Chef and The Digital Fabricator. Each one addresses a fundamental process that lies at the heart of cooking, namely the mixing of ingredients; the physical and chemical transformation of these ingredients into new compounds; and finally their modeling into aesthetically pleasing and delectable textures and shapes.

NoshWalks

Noshwalks Bubbly epicure Myra Alperson uses food—and lots of it—to draw crowds to out-of-the-way neighborhoods in all 5 boroughs. A typical Noshwalk tempts you with treats from bakeries, groceries and restaurants; on past jaunts, Alperson has taken tour goers to a kosher matzo factory in Brooklyn and a Sri Lankan market in Staten Island. Oh, and there’s some walking, too.

IBM Watson

This will be fun to watch. And to witness the drama and handwringing of the dilettante press.

For the last 3 years, IBM scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.

2014-05-05: Watson Debater

In a canned demo, Kelly chose a sample debate topic: “The sale of violent video games to minors should be banned.” The Debater was tasked with presenting pros and cons for a debate on this question. Speaking in nearly perfect English, Watson/The Debater replied: Scanned 4 million Wikipedia articles, returning 10 most relevant articles. Scanned all 3000 sentences in top 10 articles. Detected sentences which contain candidate claims. Identified borders of candidate claims. Assessed pro and con polarity of candidate claims. Constructed demo speech with top claim predictions. Ready to deliver. It then presented 3 relevant pros and cons.

2014-10-07: If the process of science itself can be changed from the current miasma of writing 19th century style papers, lack of negative results etc towards a process of discovery where all knowledge is like wikipedia, and AI infers new things, that’d be quite something.

Scientists demonstrated a possible new path for generating scientific questions that may be helpful in the long term development of new, effective treatments for disease. In a matter of weeks, biologists and data scientists using the Baylor Knowledge Integration Toolkit (KnIT), based on Watson technology, accurately identified proteins that modify p53, an important protein related to many cancers, which can eventually lead to better efficacy of drugs and other treatments. A feat that would have taken researchers years to accomplish without Watson’s cognitive capabilities, Watson analyzed 70k scientific articles on p53 to predict proteins that turn on or off p53’s activity. This automated analysis led the Baylor cancer researchers to identify 6 potential proteins to target for new research. These results are notable, considering that over the last 30 years, scientists averaged 1 similar target protein discovery per year.

2015-07-05: Chef Watson

Enter blueberries as the essential ingredient, click dessert and Watson recommends similar ingredients based on food pairing chemistry. After you’ve narrowed preferences down, Watson recommends brand-new cooking ideas, based on recipes Watson has studied. And users can go more deeply into the app too, modifying Watson’s modifications. Its website calls the human-computer partnership a tool to “amplify human creativity.”

Food Independence

The residents of Todmorden in England are working together to fast-track the creation of a local food system—the town wants to declare food independence by 2018. Considering that only 2 years into the project, a third more of the residents were tending their own vegetable gardens and 15x as many townspeople were keeping backyard chickens (part of the Every Egg Matters campaign), the town will probably meet its goals.

this is very promising.

Artisanal Pizza

Pizza connoisseurs bicker endlessly about where to find the best pies. And thanks to the brisk pace of high-profile openings in New York over the last few years — and especially the last 6 months — they have more serious local contenders than ever to bicker about. Many give the crown to Lucali, which opened in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, in 2006, and charges $34 (cash only!) for a pie with cheese, tomato, pepperoni and mushrooms. Others swear by Zero Otto Nove, which came along a bit later on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. I’ve heard plugs for the misleadingly named Salvatore of SoHo, which began churning out coal-oven pies in a Staten Island strip mall last year, and for Kesté, which unveiled its gorgeous tiled oven in the West Village in March, a pizza-mad month when other instant favorites, including Anselmo’s, in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, made their debut.

hmmm. have to try

Robot agriculture

The robots are able to locate and pick a specific tomato, and even pollinate the plants. In the long run, the researchers hope to develop a fully autonomous greenhouse.

2012-09-14:  AutoMicroFarm

AutoMicroFarm is an automated farm system that enables gardeners to grow 90% of their food with a system that replaces time, effort, and agricultural expertise with design, technology, and software. It is an open-source aquaponics system with best-of-class design, monitoring and automation to make it easy to maintain.

2016-06-01: Automation has some not so obvious consequences that should make the Birkenstock mafia happy if they weren’t so preoccupied with being luddites.
2018-05-22: New AI-enabled tractors target weeds, using 90% less herbicide

Farming is undergoing a quiet but radical transformation as machine learning and automation innovations reduce waste. One especially promising new technology targets individual weeds. This is especially important as the world slowly moves to ban glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup and others that may be linked to cancer and loss of biodiversity. Some studies have linked the chemical to changes in bee behavior.

2021-06-07: Australia’s first automated farm

Robots and artificial intelligence will replace workers on Australia’s first fully automated farm created at a cost of $20m. Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga will create the “hands-free farm” on a 19km2 property to demonstrate what robots and artificial intelligence can do without workers in the paddock. The reality of “hands-free” farming’ is closer than many people realize: “Full automation is not a distant concept. We already have mines in the Pilbara operated entirely through automation.”

2022-02-23: Verdant Robotics

Verdant Robotics announced the delivery of the industry’s first multi-action, autonomous farm-robot capable of millimeter-accurate spraying, laser weeding, and AI-based digital crop modeling, and the expansion of their robot-as-a-service offering to farmers. Combining multiple technologies, the company’s 6-row and 12-row commercial implements can treat up to 4.2 acres per hour, achieving a higher weed-removal rate per acre than other technology or human ability, and reducing chemical usage by 95%. Simultaneously, its autonomous software system collects data and uses machine learning capabilities to optimize yield and growing outcomes, ultimately unlocking new revenues to help farmers reach profitability and sustainability goals.


2023-02-23: Dogtooth strawberry picker

2023-05-01: Drones to avoid soil compaction

Early one recent morning in Vidalia, Georgia, Greg Morgan launched a Hylio AG-230 drone carrying 30l of fungicide over a field of sweet onions. The chemical, which is essential to crop survival in this humid state fell in a fine mist from the spray jets of a 36 kg drone scudding 3 meters above his cash crop. It has cut his fuel costs and already reduced his agrochemical usage by 15%. The drone has also enabled him to work his fields after heavy rains — when the ground is often too sodden for heavy equipment — and has spared his crop from the routine damage caused by tractors. It has also saved his soil from the compaction, bogging and erosion caused by farm machinery.

12-Year-Old Food Critic

Everyone’s a critic, and apparently it’s never too soon to start. That’s why David Fishman, an Upper West Sider who turned 12 last month, decided to take himself out for dinner one night last week. His parents had called him at home to say they were running late, suggesting that he grab some takeout at the usual hummus place. Hummus, again? David thought he could do better than that. He had recently passed by the newly opened Salumeria Rosi, a few blocks from his home, and had been intrigued by the reflective black back wall, the cuts of dried pork hanging from the ceiling, the little jars of cured olives and artichokes adorning the walls. If it was O.K. with his mom (and it turned out it was), he wanted to try that instead. David aspires to be a food critic he has some vague notion that he could make a living writing for the Zagat guides and the new Italian spot on Amsterdam Avenue near 73rd Street seemed worthy of investigation. That night, Tuesday, turned out to be one of the first that the restaurant was open to the public. David requested a menu, which the hostess handed him, and decided that it was within his budget ($25). Then he asked for a table for one and waited to see what she’d say. A year before, he had been turned away from a half-empty restaurant in Montauk and told that it did not serve children unaccompanied by adults. “I was angry, but I didn’t show it. What can you do?”

2 weeks later, this was optioned into a movie.