Computational Gastronomy
2 June 2010 / general, lifeIt can be a rewarding and entertaining exercise to think through the implications of prepending “computational” to various subjects of consideration — particularly those fields traditionally considered “outside” the purview of procedural science, like the arts and humanities. (As communications technologies inexorably revolutionize every aspect of contemporary life, such a gedankenexperiment is merely a reasonable strategy for planning for the very near future.) A recent conversation with my friend Joshua got me wondering about a new one, “computational gastronomy”, and reminded me that we would do well to consider computation in combination with the messiest possible subjects, like sexuality, spirituality and psychology. My initial research on computational gastronomy turned up relatively little (just a passing mention in a short story and a brief tweet from February) so I thought it could be helpful to assemble some preliminary proceedings for a virtual congress on this hot new topic. Here, then, I tender an index to some (very real) overviews and articles in emerging sub-concentrations of the field. Some of the titles are genuinely mind-bending, suggesting even stranger things to come:
- Overview of the ACM multimedia 2009 workshop on multimedia for cooking and eating activities (CEA’09)
Computation and Agriculture:
- Robotic manipulation of food products – a review (P.Y. Chua)
- Non-destructive technologies for fruit and vegetable size determination – A review (G.P. Moreda)
- Inspection and grading of agricultural and food products by computer vision systems—a review (T. Brosnan)
- Learning techniques used in computer vision for food quality evaluation: a review (C-J Du)
Recipes and Planning:
- Ontology-based semantic querying of the web with respect to food recipes (L. Gutiérrez Villarías)
- Social navigation of food recipes (M. Svensson et al.)
Computation and Food Preparation Technologies:
- Star Trek replicators and diatom nanotechnology (R. Drum et al.)
- Computational simulation of kitchen airflows with commercial hoods (R.M. Kelso et al.)
- Increasing rate of water temperature due to an Ekman layer flow in a heated pot (fluid dynamics in the kitchen) (K. Ida et al.)
Analysis of Eating Behavior:
- Fast Food Recognition from Videos of Eating for Calorie Estimation (W. Wu & J. Yang)
- Drinking activity analysis from fast food eating video using generative models (Q. Wang & J. Yang)
- Computerized collection and analysis of dietary intake information (D. Feskanich et al.)
- Automatic dietary assessment from fast food categorization (L. Yang et al.)
- Pittsburgh Fast-Food Image Dataset (M. Chen et al.)
Food Interactions and Gustatory Displays – Proposals:
- Edible Bits: Seamless Interfaces between People, Data and Food (D. Maynes-Aminzade)
- Food simulator: A haptic interface for biting (H. Iwata et al.) *recommended
- Straw-like user interface: virtual experience of the sensation of drinking using a straw (Y. Hashimoto et al.)
The Star Trek replicator, a computational gastronomy system.
From XKCD (#720): A speculation on genetic algorithms and recipe generation. (Thx @zzkt)
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