Cognitive Cooking: Inside IBM’s Watson Food Truck

by Darryl K. Taft

At this year’s SXSW, the IBM Watson food truck served up exotic delicacies that were created through collaboration between Watson, a cognitive computing system, and award-winning chefs at New York’s Institute of Culinary Education (ICE).

Capitalizing on Watson’s encyclopedic knowledge of food chemistry, existing recipes and information about why people like certain foods and cooking styles, ICE chefs James Briscione and Michael Laiskonis took recipes generated by Watson and prepared them for event attendees to sample. In this image, ICE Creative Director Laiskonis is making pudding.

Both visitors to the IBM Watson food truck and the public voted on dishes they wanted made. Using the #IBMFoodTruck hashtag, users picked from a list of dishes, and the ICE chefs and IBM researchers turned the top-trending ideas into one-of-a-kind dishes that were served the next day.

The Watson food truck is an example of IBM’s ongoing efforts to push the boundaries of technology and explore new applications for cognitive computing. The project demonstrated, in a common language for everyone—food—the ability for machines to collaborate with people to create new things. In this image, IBM chefs and scientists devise a new recipe at the IBM food truck during SXSW.

This example of cognitive computing is just the beginning of groundbreaking advances in this new era of computing. What is learned from the research will lay the groundwork for how this technology is applied to other domains (beyond food) where design and discovery are key, and offer the opportunity to transform customer experience. These are big data challenges, and Watson is the answer. In this image, chef Michael Laiskonis and IBM scientist Florian Pinel discuss the day’s activities at SXSW.

This is a screenshot of the IBM Watson Cognitive Cooking User Interface. It shows the early steps of creating a Watson-inspired dish. After answering questions about primary flavor/ingredient, type of cuisine and type of dish, step 4 is about adjusting ingredients.

The IBM Watson food truck made its debut on the show floor at the IBM Pulse 2014 cloud computing conference in Las Vegas last month.

ICE chefs James Briscione (left) and Michael Garrett after a day of cooking in the IBM Watson food truck at IBM Pulse 2014. Briscione is a chef instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education.

IBM served up a Portuguese lobster roll from the Watson food truck at IBM Pulse 2014.

This Baltic Apple Pie was served from the IBM Watson Food Truck at IBM Pulse 2014.

Crowds gather to try the dishes from the IBM Watson Food truck at SXSW. Visitors get to vote on different dishes. The recipes were created through collaboration between IBM Watson and chefs at New York’s Institute of Culinary Education.

Some visitors to the IBM Watson food truck at SXSW appear a little wary of trying something new and different like the Vietnamese apple kebab.

At SXSW in Austin, Texas, the IBM Watson food truck is serving up exotic dishes—like this Vietnamese apple kebab—that explore computing’s culinary creativity.

The IBM Watson food truck is also serving up exotic dishes like this Belgian bacon pudding at SXSW.

Another exotic dish that the IBM Watson food truck is serving up at SXSW is Caribbean snapper fish and chips.