The Internet of Things brings connectivity to our products – smart products if you will. So now Watson, IBM’s robotic genius, has its first celebrity chef. Yes Watson is releasing a cookbook this April.
Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson features more than 65 recipes “unconventional ingredient concepts generated by Chef Watson.” Watson was fed tens of thousands of recipes, chemical breakdowns of foods, nutritional data, and flavor-combination preferences for humans and then each recipe was developed by a team of chefs from the Institute of Culinary Education. The chefs carefully crafted, evaluated, and perfected each of these dishes for ‘pleasantness’ (superb taste), ‘surprise'(innovativeness), and a ‘synergy’ of mouth-watering ingredients that will delight any food lover – basically “humanizing” the experience. A twitter campaign was held where people voted for the recipes they want to see Watson create – so no big surprise when someone from Austin Texas voted for burritos. An event was held at SXSW – an annual tech conference where the top recipes were shared. As can only be expected from something that doesn’t really eat and like the trials and tribulations any recipe developer, there must have been some “interesting” if not down right amusing computer generated recipes to weed through.
As you will find in this cookbook, Watson whipped up a number of surprising flavor combos that top chefs then played with creating recipes like Spanish Almond Crescent, Creole Shrimp-Lamb Dumplings, Austrian Chocolate Burrito, Hoof-and-Honey Ale, Vietnamese Apple Kebab, Poutine and Chile, and Belgian Bacon Pudding. Here are a few of the results:
Cooking: Vietnamese Apple Kebab
Cognitive Cooking: Austrian Chocolate Burrito
Cognitive Cooking: Poutine & Chili
“For chefs, creativity is one of the most important elements for success. Human chefs can reason with a finite set of ingredients, or those that they have been exposed to. Using this technology, their creativity is enhanced by quintillions of possible ingredient pairings, augmenting their creativity,” said Brian Aronowitz, CMO of the Institute of Culinary Education.
“One of the concepts we wanted to demonstrate with Chef Watson is this notion of discovery and computational creativity,” said Florian Pinel, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Watson Group.
“To discover something new, be it a medical insight or recipe, requires insight into a large body of information and being able to use that insight to make connections and draw conclusions. Whether you’re working in the kitchen or the laboratory, Watson’s ability to reason and learn can help humans arrive at new discoveries.”
Cognitive Cooking by IBM
