IBM's supercomputer Watson is whipping up meals for patrons visiting the South by South West (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas.
The 10-day SXSW festival kicked off on Friday, March 7. At the festival, a Watson-operated food truck staffed with award-winning chefs from New York's Institute of Culinary Education has been creating various dishes for select visitors.
Menu ideas will be generated via suggestions from fans on Twitter and Watson will scan potential combinations to make a dish.
"The system begins by capturing and analyzing tens of thousands of existing recipes to understand ingredient pairings and dish composition, and which it rearranges and redesigns into new recipes. It then cross references these with data on the flavor compounds found in ingredients, and the psychology of people's likes and dislikes...to model how the human palate might respond to different combinations of flavors," per IBM.
The cognitive computer scores potential recipe combinations based on their pleasantness, pairing and surprise of raw ingredients. When it finds the best in all the three categories, the recipe will be cooked by human chef's and served out by an IBM food truck known as the Cognitive Kitchen.
"We made an Italian grilled lobster that paired saffron, tomato, pumpkin, mint, olives, orange and bacon - something that we would never have thought of putting all together," said Florian Pinel, senior software engineer at IBM Watson Group to BBC. "The Baltic apple pie... with apple, blueberries, apricots, ginger, pork, garlic and onion is another recipe that you won't find at any bakery I know of."
The top trending food type recipes made by the Watson are pie, fish and chips and dumplings. However, it's entirely on Watson to define what the dish will be infused with.
Steve Abrams of IBM Watson Group says that computers can be creative and help humans to come up with creative ideas. Abrams say that Watson is one of the "crowning achievements of human intelligence."
IBM launched the Cognitive Cooking project in 2013 at its Almadeen research lab. The project made its debut in February this year at IBM Pulse in Las Vegas and it has now traveled to the SXSW.
IBM says that the aim of the project is to test the boundaries of cognitive computing and human collaboration. The company is trying to explore how the interaction between humans and machines can benefit various industries from healthcare to transportation.
