#18 Ganesh Bagler - Designing Food Using Machine Learning

Bold Conjectures with Paras Chopra

The tastiest food hasn't yet been invented.
With the diversity of ingredients available to us for making dishes, the number of possible recipes is gigantic. Human chefs have only explored a fraction of this food-space. Perhaps computers can step in here. I talk to Ganesh Bagler who's pioneering a new field called computational gastronomy that aims to utilize machine learning techniques to understand food and create new recipes that don't yet exist.
== What we talk about ==
0:04 - Introduction
1:55 - What is computational gastronomy?
3:42 - You have been a researcher on computational biology, how did you end up getting interested in computational gastronomy?
8:04 - What is food and how do you model it in data?
11:07 - The data-centric approach in your research and recipe & flavor databases
17:34 - What have been some of the most surprising insights from the data you have?
22:25 - The evolution of cuisines across the world
28:39 - What is personalized food? And what can we expect to discover in the research you are doing?
36:26 - Food is personal - have you faced any objections to the work you are doing?
41:40 - What are the biggest unanswered questions about food that you want to answer?
46:32 - Your personal experience with food after you started this research
== About the guest ==
Dr. Ganesh Bagler is a professor at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in Delhi, India. He is pioneering a new field called Computational Gastronomy, which combines machine learning, data and food. He holds a PhD in computational biology from Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, India.
Food traditionally evolved via hit-and-trial methods. Someone thousands of years ago left wheat flour outside and when it tasted good, we got bread. The food we eat was culturally selected for many different reasons - nutritional, microbial, taste, digestion and so on. Ganesh Bagler is trying to use modern ML techniques to unravel the mysteries of food that we eat and then create intelligent algorithms that design totally new types of foods and recipes.