The Adaptation of AI in the Food Industry

The food industry is a pretty broad expression that describes our everyday food on the table and local supermarkets, to restaurants, food factories, farmers, and general agriculture. All of these places are possibilities for AI to intervene for enhancement.

For example, AI interfaces that already exist for everyday assistance would be apps that provide healthy meal recipes catered to our needs or camera apps that can automatically calculate the calories on a plate. At industrial levels, factories and retail stores use AI to enhance productivity through inventory management and cashless payment systems.

In agriculture, there are farms that already use automated tractors to plow the land and drones programmed to automatically spray pesticides in specific areas when the cameras sense harmful pests.

Although the applications of AI are diverse, there are still challenges. If the AI malfunctions for whatever reason, in the end, it requires manual intervention from a human. There are still lots of improvements and testing that need to be done to rely upon completely automated systems.

The Possibilities of Robot Chefs

Are you aware of the “Moley Robotics Kitchen?’

It’s an automated kitchen robot that can cut, stir, boil, serve, and clean up afterward. This invention was made by a company called Moley Robotics that released its prototype in 2015 to provide an automated cooking service.

People were amazed when they first saw the two robotic arms artfully complete human tasks.

It downloads recipes from its own site and the user could pick different menus from various countries, cooking time, and calories. It’s a great idea in concept but has not been implemented yet due to challenges such as costs. Moley Robotics claims commercial use plans to happen in 2021.

It’s crazy that a robot can provide cooking services from scratch from whatever menu we like. AI robots can store and learn from their data, constantly improving their technique. In that sense, AI has a lot of potential in making our lives greater.

The Era of Robot Restaurants on the Rise

There are restaurants in the world that already implement automation by robots. In China, there is a robot-aided hotpot restaurant where robots roam the floor to serve while, an AI system assists to manage the kitchen, reception, and inventory for optimal productivity.

There are still real humans involved as they need to assure aspects of safety and maintenance. However, automation allows for the company to cut big costs. With the extra money, they can invest more into food materials, menu development, and service quality, which adds more value to the restaurant and increases customer satisfaction.

Another high interest among food AI developers is to “quantify taste.” This will allow an. objective perspective through data, and the collected data will help understand developers whether certain factors like age and sexual orientation matter in what we consider delicious. If taste could be understood through data, in turn, it will help us understand our own liking of food.

High Hopes for AI Future Tech in Food

AI already is part of our lives and has so much more potential to enhance our eating experience. Although it will still take time to completely rely on automation, over time, the technological developments will most likely allow us to rely on AI for nutrition and eating habit management. Accurate information obtained from AI deep learning will solidify the grounds enough for people to rely upon it.

An AI that can provide the best-customized menu according to a person’s health conditions, taste buds, and timing without any manual labor involved, will surely have a demand for busy health-conscious people.

We all desire safe delicious meals. It may not be that far into the future that we can rely on technology that assists this.

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Reference：

Izawa, H., & Yamanishi, R. (2018, June 5–8). How can we apply AI to a study of gastronomy? [Presentation]. The 32nd Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, Kagoshima, Japan. https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/pjsai/JSAI2018/0/JSAI2018_2O3OS24b02/_pdf/-char/ja

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What Is Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT)?

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is a type of talk therapy that focuses on a person’s cognitive distortions (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes) and behaviors, to improve emotional regulation.

For example, when something occurs in our life, we make decisions and judgments based on our past experiences. The reactional thoughts we immediately have are called automated thoughts. These automated thoughts are usually grounded and rational. However, when people are under extreme stress or exhaustion, these thoughts distort negatively. This issue can be solved by focusing on these thoughts to understand what is realistic and not. The repeated process of this can create a balance within our mental thoughts.

Still, this is not an easy process. It requires a trained professionals’ guidance to provide the insight and perspectives needed. In reality, there are not enough professionals to handle the rising demands of mental health assistance that are required.

Therefore, online sessions are becoming a popular way to provide CBT for those in need to increase the number of patients that can be taken care of. The effects of online versus in-person sessions have been an interest of study for researchers.

Online CBT Sessions

Among the online CBT sessions, there is research particularly looking into how artificial intelligence (AI) might be helpful for facilitation.

A company divided their testers into 3 groups and tried CBT in the following different ways:

Group 1: An online CBT session with no other person involved. The user just answers questions and learns on their own without any feedback.

Group 2: The user receives advice through an AI capable of natural language processing. The AI will provide advice based on what the user has written and show empathy through the facial expressions of a woman that appears on the monitor. If the user is vague in their description, the AI asks to rewrite their answers.

Group 3: A control group where they do nothing.

What were the effects of these different methods?

The Surprising Effects of AI

Results showed that Group 1 had the best immediate short-term results for relieving depression, but many did not stick to the sessions after a while. On the other hand, Group 2 had better results in the long run with a significant reduction in severely depressed patients.

Why would Group 2 have a better long-term outcome when there was no immediate effect?

Feedback Creates Motivation

A survey asked why people quit their online CBT sessions and most answered, “I don’t understand what I’m doing” or “I want feedback.”

In Group 2, the natural language processing AI was able to empathize with their users and gave feedback that they needed to rewrite their answers if the content was weak. This kind of feedback is thought to be the reason why users felt the motivation to continue.

Online CBT Sessions Have Low Immediate Effect

There were low immediate improvements felt through online CBT sessions. Why is this? There are a few possible reasons:

• There were limits to the natural language processing and the AI was not able to empathize with the user sufficiently
• When users were asked to “rewrite,” it seemed like they were being corrected
• The correction to rewrite answers wasn’t necessarily the best way to understand feelings

Find A CBT Session Fit For You

There are still improvements to be made, but CBT through AI has big potential to significantly improve symptoms of depression. If the AI evolves enough to empathize and give better advice, many people can benefit from its use.

It’s not that far into the future that our online technology will become essential in meeting our individual mental needs.

References:

Mirai, S., Sekizawa, Y., & Takebayashi, Y. (2017, May 23–26). Can Artificial Intelligence Heal Human Hearts?：A randomized controlled trial on the effects of internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy with natural language processing on depression [Presentation]. The 31st Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, Aichi, Japan. https://www.ai-gakkai.or.jp/jsai2017/webprogram/2017/pdf/98.pdf

Cognitive behavioral therapy. (2016, September 8). National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279297/

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