Cooking with computers, a winning recipe!

Abstract

In our daily lives, cooking becomes more and more important. In many countries, you just have to switch television on to see the proliferation of cooking shows of all kinds: live cooking classes, cooking at home challenges, cooking contests (for everyone or for professionals), short recipes demos, etc. This witnesses two emergent phenomena: cooking gains a growing interest as a leisure, and people gain awareness of the role of food in our daily lives as well as the many reasons why should ”eat well”. In academic research, this trend is also observed, and many funding are related to well-being, health, nutrition, and other issues related to food. In many research fields, cooking is present: smart cooking appliances, cooking robots, vision techniques to recognize ingredients, and so on. In the areas of Web and artificial intelligence, the challenges are also numerous. How to represent recipes? How to adapt recipes to meet the needs of users? How to take into account the social aspects of cooking? Can we create social recipes books? In this presentation we will provide an overview of the challenges that cooking raises for computer science and information technology. We start by introducing the Taaable project, a website that makes use of case-based reasoning to adapt recipes. From that presentation, we draw a lessons learned while working on this project. Then we expand the scope of our study to other projects and initiatives combining computer and cooking. We adopt different points of view in that study, depending on the projects and their goals. We focus on the many issues addressed by these initiatives, such as representation of cooking recipes, suggestions, recommendations, dietary practices, personalization, social side, creativity, etc. Finally, we will review the prospects for research in this field and discuss current initiatives.