I couldn’t attend the full two days of the Gastro Tech Days Days Meeting in Barcelona, organized by Telefónica I+D and elbulliFoundation. I missed the first day due to being superjetlaged thanks to the flight from New York. Never understood how my metabolism works: sometimes I arrive fresh, sometimes absolutely worn out.
Anyway. I attended and also presented at the second GastroTech day. Today I give a short summary of what I saw and heard. I will avoid talking about our presentation with Pilar Opazo, since I already posted it right there on the spot, the same day we gave it .
I missed three presentations because I had to attend to work obligations. Then, I cannot summarize them here. Unfortunately, this is not going to be a complete overview. Sorry about that. Nevertheless, I hope it helps to give the flavour of the meeting as research is concerned.
Common points:
- It was very interesting to see how the many different views from very diverse disciplines food and cooking could inspire: from philosophy and aesthetics to artificial intelligence, there were very interesting contributions.
- It also showed that, once you break the usual barriers, almost any subject can be a source of inspiration. Or not: is cooking is a special case because it is a cultural activity to which all humans have access in one degree or another? What other fields of human activity might generate such response?
- There are opportunities for joint research. To me, at least, it inpsired a lot of connections to do research.
- In order to design and deploy new information-based services and business there are some technological hurdles to be negotiated. The language of the food and of the cooking experience is very evocative ... and ambiguous. Language automatic processing does not generally fare very well with ambiguity (fuzzy logic aside ;-)). That poses a fundamental challenge for ontological engineering. Which, on the other hand, it is a very needed thing in the whole picture and possibilities of work that one could see emerging there.
- Cultural patterns around the appreciation of taste, dining experience, of being together at the table as well as the creativity that generates all this, influence the capabilities and functionality of services. We have to keep a keen eye on this if we are to design and develop significant services.
- The connection of all these possibilities can be useful for entities that want to encourage creativity and innovation starting from food and cooking.
So, withouth much furtther ado, here is my summary.
Gastronomic Online Social Networks, Balachander Krishnamurthy
Khrisnamurthy drew an overall panorama of the various social networks that have grown around food and gastronomy. He cited the impact of various rating and ranking mechanisms and highlighted the importance that they increasingly have with respect to classic and established guides and references (Michelin, etc.).
Also he commented in detail the existing problems when one has to provide or extract valid and useful information from these networks to guide decision making:
- knowledge representation of users and their interests
- reputation issues
- combining these with influence within the network and with some weighting schema that should qualify the votes and views of users: how do you know that a user is really influential? That is, fan location and corresponds to real knowledge and not a conscious manipulation of the way we communicate?
Finally he described some of the technological challenges needed to turn some of these perspectives into realities:
- Standards: Common and interoperational representations
- Ontologies: are used describe the context so that a machine can understand what the meaning of human expressions. "I was shocked with this dish" can mean different things according to the text and the context that accompanies it. It can hint at a positive or negative interpretation
Kenton O'Hara. Shared Cooking and Eating
O'Hara presented his ethnographic and anthropological research on the customs and practices of eating together and, in particular, with regard to the use of information and media while eating together.
The work focused on the creation of an "information appliance" that would be used on eating tables (during friends or family meals, for example). This device stored photographs and other media.
Kenton O'Hara presenting his research. The table "device" is on the screen.
The idea was to see how they influenced the act of eating together, and what kind of new dynamics it brought. Tellingly, it introduced new social rituals such as "I enjoyed your dinner, but I am afraid I have not uploaded enough pictures of our trip last year." I thought it would be interesting to extend the study to other cultures, because it was mainly focused on Anglo-Saxon countries.
Pilar Opazo & Ramon Sangüesa. Language as a platform for innovation: Lessons from elBulli.
We presented the general lines of work on elBulli organization and its change. We focused on how it has created a language that has strategically defined a playing field where all those interested in high innovation in gastronomy have entered. That is, by extending the use of internal language of their organization, they have created a dominant effect of the gastronomic discourse. But as I already described that in a previous post.
Johanna Blakley. Keynote - Food, Innovation, and Intellectual Property Rights
Blakley's presentation dealt with the characteristics of the knowledge of gastronomic and culinary products. Specifically she discussed what is a recipe and what kinds of protections you have. She use as a comparison the practices around intellectual property in other industries related to the use of creativity: fashion, music, literature, cinema, etc.. Also with traditional areas such as the automobile industry.
Her line of argumentation was to favour those models that thrived on knowledge sharing (Guess who created the recipe for omelette after all) She argued that they can generate more innovation and in a more distributed way. She also mentioned similar models in the field of open source and their multiplier effect of innovation. References to the usual suspects both in Open Innovation (Chessbrough) and Open and Networked Economy (Yochai Benkler) were made.
Blakley also commented how the big names in some sectors make use of copying form the practices of the public and how they integrated it in their creativity. She stressed the relationship between the big names and the fashion big chains, Lagerfeld and HM, for example.
In this regard she showed that, despite claims to the contrary by the traditional players (fashion designers, musicians, etc..) the role of copying and piracy was positive in the sense that it generated a bigger appreciation for the prestige brand names and actually increased their sales.
At the same time Blakley stressed the relationship of the major brands and designers with the "low" and democratic creatives. She reminded us how the "trend scouts" of the big brands explore what people from low income neighborhoods, do. For example, people who are creative in reusing clothes and recycled or pirated materials and recombine them into their own personal creations. This, in turn, generates a symbiotic effect: the big brands are inspired by "street fashion", in that sense. So, copying works both ways (but with different economic results if I may say so).
In short, she stressed the possibility of a combination effect of the democratic approach and the guru approach. The latter come to be recognized for their style and their contribution value and also work as a lever for facilitating decision making for the masses. When people have to choose between two options they prefer the guru product or the one that reminds them of the guru’s style. According to her, then, through opennes a dynamic imaginative interplay can be harnessed for the general benefit of everyone.
M. Powell. Genome Hacking and Food Food
The creator of a Foodspotting is as passionate about hacking as he is about food and it shows in his presentation style gallop, full of energy and humor. Powell has also been involved in gastronomy businesses such as the Fat Duck restaurant. He presented various technological approaches, focusing on two concepts:
Food Hacking: How to "hack" recipes
Genome Food: what defines the basic gastronomic creation mechanisms and their social acceptance. On this, he also introduced technological solutions for both the generation of creativity and the visualization and use of trends.
Food Hacking
The concept of food and hacking comes straight form the computer hacking culture. It bolis down to how open and remix a recipe developed by others to create new recipes. Powell showed different programs that are essentially combination generators that help in this. He stressed the need for open data representations for recipes that would allow such software to use them to generate new recipes.
Food Genome
This part of the presentation was more directed find out what defines the basis for accepting the results of good cuisine. He used the example of FoodSpotting and other similar systems which are able to “see” at any given time what dishes are being order in restaurants all over the world and to visualize them geographically. Then to compare this with the ingredients, flavours and taste. in this way you can either see or build the genome of taste in the world by having a look at the combination of ingredients and how they are distinctly distributed at any given time. This, can be used to fine tune recipes to local taste, specially recipes obtained by generative software.
S.Ahnert/Y.Ahn Ingredients. Flavours and Data Mining
This was a presentation of a more scientific tome but nevertheless still related to an inquiry into the "genome" of the various world cuisines. The interesting thing is that the authors performed a thorough, in depth study focusing on more or less agreed sources of recipes and ingredients instead of subjective appreciations of dishes. So to speak, they “decomposed” recipes into their basic ingredients and they used the relationship between ingredients to get a better understanding of the style of every local cuisine.
They wanted to verify to what extent the "style" of every culture has to do with a peculiar use and combination of distinctive ingredients. This may seem as something that all of us know in some way or other. But one thing is to have an intuitive idea about this phenomenon and other to have objective evidence and a clear depiction.
It's like trying to detect which genes are activated together.
The result of their research showed clearly very different patterns in the joint use of ingredients and different points of contact between difference world cuisines through these ingredients and thei structure of their typcial relationships. Like soya and pure flavours in Asian cuisine. Also some interesting connection roles. For example the tomato acted as a "bridge" between the worlds of flavors of Latin America and the Mediterranean. The second part of the presentation was a second turn of this study where the authors also work with the proportion of effective use of the ingredients, i,e,at what proportion a major shift in the perception of the ingredient was created. The combination of both dimensions gave a very deep knowledge, both quantitative and structural, about the dynamics of ingredient interaction. In this way they amplified and complemented the previous results.
T. Roelleke. Rating of Restaurants 2.0 What do reviews tell?
This presentation explored the many variants that reviews in online sites like Yelp and others use to comment on recipes and restaurants. The presenter stressed the cultural differences in the appreciation of food, recipes, styles and restaurants. He stressed that people’s assessments not only use strictly culinary aspects but also take into consideration other factors such us local proximity, similarity to friends’ tastes and the weight of the local culture when they share their appreciation of a gastronomic phenomenon. And when all these aspects are merged into a single review, the sentences are more complex than they seem to be at surface level. And more difficult to interpret.
This he showed by giving precise examples and comparisons of different forms of expression online. He reviewed several online platforms that aggregated users reviews and recommendations. He pointed to substantial differences between the parameters that the different platforms offer to their users to categorize their reviews. He also showed the enormous degree of ambiguity in interpretation and the difficulty of extracting the meaning of expressions of user feedback when they are expressed as free form texts. In general they were richer and more subtle that pre-categorized evaluations, which made them difficult to translate into simple numerical evaluations. Thus, it is easier to understand, measure, sort, or integrate information from rankings which scores a dish from one to ten than to try to qualify or quantify expressions like "I cannot say this is the best restaurant I have eaten in but I liked the second course" and similar expressions.
He proposed that a lot of work has to be carried in the systematic description of these dimensions of assessment if we have to create reliable automatic processing systems of all information around food, dining, restaurants and gastronomy in general. In sum, he pointed towards a lot of work in Semantic Web technologies and similar ones.
G. Sinclair. Super Mario's Mushrooms: the role of food in video games
Geri Sinclair led a fascinating tour around a variety of games from the standpoint of food, which is used in videogames at least as :
- an energy source
- a way to earn points
- a way to socialize
The food is not only consumed but also cooked in various games. She stressed the role of food and games to promote healthy eating habits.
Finally she drew an analogy between entering into a creative restaurant (like El Bulli) or starting to play a computer game: in both cases you enter a world that operates with different rules and where one must be open to discovery, surprise and be ready for "magic" and she explicitly quoted some expressions from Ferran Adrià that remark precisely this aspect of entering a separate, magic, world.
P. Inverardi. Food and Computer Science
The presentation focused on finding relationships between the processes of food design and software engineering. These fields have much in common in the construction process, and creativity. This shows in the fact that they share common fans such as programmers who cook, as Powell, and vice versa.
Inverardi focused on some aspects of the processes that take place in both fields such as compositionality and modularity, and connected them with combinatorics. The interesting thing is that his contribution went beyond the already oft-repeated analogy between software "remix" that is typical of Open Source and facilitate personal creativity and an overal increase of innovation (Blakley’s mainline of argumentation) open and the "remix" of shared recipes. Inverardi pointint to something more fundamental in the ways of thinking and doing in both knowledge domains.
Instead of taking this path she centered on the kitchen and software engineering and design processes and stressed shared common design principles.
The word “metadesign” was constantly on my mind as I was listening to Inverardi’s presentation.
I had to be absent during these presentations to meet different work obligations.
Gerard Vila y Jessica Jacques. Gastronomía, estética, arte y cocina
Gerard Vila, professor of aesthetics at the UAB, and Jessica Jaques presented an approximation to the aesthetics of food and gastronomy. They showed that this was an approach that allowed to shake the field of aesthetics, which had been more focused on the experience of beauty and its conceptual proximity. In this regard, they stressed that cooking introduced categories and questions like "what is flavor" "what is the aesthetic pleasure of food”, “what kind of pleasure goes beyond taste in relation to food”. Also, what makes something rises to the level of art (as in the case of haute cuisine).
They asked how all this is instrumental in reassessing the aesthetic experience and can open up other possibilities for the research field of aesthetics.
They also commented the results of their work with elBulli in the Master programme they organize at UAB. They described the interest in expressing culinary aesthetic concepts with food and gastronomy categories and vice versa. Also the process and practice of building these categories.
To sum up, I had a great time!.
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