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“There are few things social media users love more than flooding their feeds with photos of food. Yet we seldom use these images for much more than a quick scroll on our cellphones. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) believe that analyzing photos like these could help us learn recipes and better understand people’s eating habits. In a new paper with the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), the team trained an artificial intelligence system called Pic2Recipe to look at a photo of food and be able to predict the ingredients and suggest similar recipes. “In computer vision, food is mostly neglected because we don’t have the large-scale datasets needed to make predictions,” says Yusuf Aytar, an MIT postdoc who co-wrote a paper about the system with MIT Professor Antonio Torralba. “But seemingly useless photos on social media can actually provide valuable insight into health habits and dietary preferences.” The paper will be presented later this month at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Honolulu. CSAIL graduate student Nick Hynes was lead author alongside Amaia Salvador of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Spain. Co-authors include CSAIL postdoc Javier Marin, as well as scientist Ferda Ofli and research director Ingmar Weber of QCRI.”

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