Sony AI has recently announced its first major research initiative in the Gastronomy Flagship Project, an AI-powered initiative aiming to enhance chefs’ creativity and techniques worldwide.
The Gastronomy Flagship Project consists of an AI application for creating new recipes, a robotics solution that can help chefs cook, and a community co-creation initiative as a foundation for these exercises.
Sony states that the initial research and development focuses on optimizing food preparation, cooking, and delivery. They aim to train proprietary AI algorithms on various data resources, including recipes and ingredient information (such as taste, flavor, nutrients, aroma, and molecular structure) to assist the world’s top chefs designing recipes and menus. Recipe creation is the combination of countless ingredients and restrictions such as location, climate, season, and health and food preferences, making it a challenging research area for AI.
The next step is to create a robot that will help with the complete cooking process from preparation to the plating. Sony AI intends to develop a system that can replicate and exceed chefs’ skills and techniques with high precision and speed. This will be achieved through sensors and machine learning techniques like imitation learning. Remote operations of these robots, such as serving the chef’s meals to people in remote areas, are also in the scope of these research and development ventures.
Sony AI announces its support to these initiatives with partnerships involving universities, research institutes, and companies leading in machine learning research to apply information to the development of AI apps and robots.
The company hopes that this automated solution can also contribute to people’s health and the environment’s sustainability. They want to use its machine learning tools to facilitate community collaboration and interaction in the chef world. They plan to release interviews with various chefs on food sustainability and dietary health during the pandemic as a community-building series.
Sony AI’s efforts to AI-powered initiative can also lead to new nutritional discoveries, improved cultivation methods, and smart solutions to the emerging issues of hunger and starvation.
Source: https://ai.sony/articles/sonyai003/
Tanushree Shenwai is a consulting intern at MarktechPost. She is currently pursuing her B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Bhubaneswar. She is a Data Science enthusiast and has a keen interest in the scope of application of artificial intelligence in various fields. She is passionate about exploring the new advancements in technologies and their real-life application.
