Sony AI teams up with Korea University to map out new food flavour combos
Sony AI and Korea University have jointly developed an artificial intelligence mapping tool called FlavorGraph that can recommend complementary ingredient pairings to help chefs come up with dishes.
According to Sony AI, FlavorGraph uses AI to predict the pairing fit of two ingredients by combining information drawn from 1,561 flavour molecules found in different ingredients together with the way the ingredients have been used in millions of past recipes.
"As well as relationships between food ingredients and flavour compounds that have not been explored before, the FlavorGraph research will allow greater flexibility for matching single or multiple ingredients to many others," a blog post penned by Sony AI strategy and partnership manager Fred Gifford and Korea University post-doctoral researcher Donghyeon Park said.
"As the science develops and we get ever better representations of food, we should discover more and more intriguing pairings of ingredients, as well as new substitutes for ingredients that are either unhealthy or unsustainable."
The development of FlavorGraph is one of the first projects to come from Sony AI's gastronomy flagship project. Launched at the end of last year, the machine learning and AI research arm of the Japanese tech conglomerate touted the project would focus on three key areas: An AI application for new recipe creation, a robotics solution that can assist chefs in the kitchen, and a community co-creation initiative.
Sony AI said it would use data sources -- including recipes and ingredient data, such as taste, aroma, flavour, molecular structure, and nutrients -- to develop the recipe creation app, which it hopes will be used by chefs when designing recipes and menus.
In other Sony news, the company's semiconductor business has announced that its new fab, nicknamed Fab 5, has opened at its Nagasaki Technology Centre. The new fab, Sony said, will be used for mass production of its CMOS image sensors for smartphones.
Elsewhere, LG has revealed that despite announcing earlier this month that it would shut down its smartphone business by July 31, the company plans to keep its production facility in Vietnam around.
Its Vietnam production facility, based in Haiphong, is LG's largest smartphone production base.
"The closing of LG's mobile business will not significantly impact LG's production, business activities, or employees in Haiphong," LG Electronics Vietnam president Jung Hai-jin assured.
Jung said LG would instead refocus its Vietnam facility on manufacturing a range of the company's products that have been in high demand globally, such as home appliances.
"LG plans to complete the transformation and reallocate all workers within this year. Additional investment plans will be announced once the transformation has been completed," the company stated.