The Internet of Things has its first celebrity chef: IBM’s Watson, which is releasing a cookbook in April.
Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson, due in April, features more than 65 recipes developed by the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) using “unconventional ingredient concepts generated by Chef Watson.”
The results offering surprising flavor twists indeed (check out recipes below), including Spanish Almond Crescent, Creole Shrimp-Lamb Dumplings, Austrian Chocolate Burrito, Hoof-and-Honey Ale, Vietnamese Apple Kebab, Poutine and Chile—and, of course, bacon via Belgian Bacon Pudding.[more]
“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,” stated Brian Aronowitz, CMO of the Institute of Culinary Education.
“After working with IBM for the last few years testing and refining the system,,” he added, “ICE chefs have 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.”
“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.”
IBM is investing $1 billion in the Watson Group, bringing cloud-delivered cognitive applications and services to market.
You can’t put #ChefWatson itself on your shelf, but you can get our @IBMWatson cookbook: http://t.co/y4T5xmHFuD pic.twitter.com/CVkIkX6rXC
— ICE (@iceculinary) January 22, 2015
Watson was fed tens of thousands of recipes, chemical breakdowns of foods, nutritional data, and flavor-combination preferences for humans. The cookbook is accompanied by Bon Appetit’s mobile app, which has been in beta since June.
“The app is the next step in the evolution of our cognitive cooking technology, which was introduced by IBM and the Institute of Culinary Education (in 2014) with the Watson Food Truck at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas,” writes IBM’s Steve Abrams. “It’s an incredibly cool application of cognitive technology.”