搜索结果：Food microbiology

As the global population and the per capita demand for resource intensive diets continues to grow, the corresponding increase in food demand challenges the global food system, enhancing its reliance on trade. Most previous research typically constructed either unweighted networks or weighted solely by tonnage to represent food trade, and focused on bilateral trade relationships between pairs of countries. This study investigates the properties of global food trade constructed in terms of total food calories associated with all the main food products exchanged along each trade link (edge of the food trade network). Utilizing data from the Food and Agriculture Organization between 1986 and 2022, we construct a directed, weighted network of net caloric flows between countries. This approach highlights the importance of considering nutritional value in discussions of food security and trade policies, offering a more holistic view of global food trade dynamics. Our analysis reveals significant heterogeneity in trade patterns, with certain countries emerging as major exporters or importers of food calories. Moreover, we employ network measures, including network connectivity, network het

Food is very essential for human life and it is fundamental to the human experience. Food-related study may support multifarious applications and services, such as guiding the human behavior, improving the human health and understanding the culinary culture. With the rapid development of social networks, mobile networks, and Internet of Things (IoT), people commonly upload, share, and record food images, recipes, cooking videos, and food diaries, leading to large-scale food data. Large-scale food data offers rich knowledge about food and can help tackle many central issues of human society. Therefore, it is time to group several disparate issues related to food computing. Food computing acquires and analyzes heterogenous food data from disparate sources for perception, recognition, retrieval, recommendation, and monitoring of food. In food computing, computational approaches are applied to address food related issues in medicine, biology, gastronomy and agronomy. Both large-scale food data and recent breakthroughs in computer science are transforming the way we analyze food data. Therefore, vast amounts of work has been conducted in the food area, targeting different food-oriented

The global food landscape is rife with scientific, cultural, and commercial claims about what foods are, what they do, what they should not do, or should not do. These range from rigorously studied health benefits (probiotics improve gut health) and misrepresentations (soaked almonds make one smarter) to vague promises (superfoods boost immunity) and culturally rooted beliefs (cold foods cause coughs). Despite their widespread influence, the infrastructure for tracing, verifying, and contextualizing these claims remains fragmented and underdeveloped. In this paper, we propose a Food Claim-Traceability Network (FCN) as an extension of FKG[.]in, a knowledge graph of Indian food that we have been incrementally building. We also present the ontology design and the semi-automated knowledge curation workflow that we used to develop a proof of concept of FKG[.]in-FCN using Reddit data and Large Language Models. FCN integrates curated data inputs, structured schemas, and provenance-aware pipelines for food-related claim extraction and validation. While directly linked to the Indian food knowledge graph as an application, our methodology remains application-agnostic and adaptable to other g

Food assistance referral requires conversational agents to translate underspecified, often noisy help-seeking dialogues into locally valid resource recommendations. We present Food4All, an agentic food-resource referral framework and benchmark grounded in 686 structured Indiana food resources. Food4All couples a food-specific search tool with 300 multi-turn evaluation tasks spanning single food needs, composite cases with access or document constraints, and five non-ideal user interaction traits: unreasonable demands, rambling responses, impatience, incomplete answers, and inconsistent information. We evaluate six Large Language Models (LLMs) on requirement grounding, resource retrieval, final referral correctness, and interaction efficiency. Although the strongest model achieves 96.33% referral accuracy, our diagnostics reveal persistent failures in grounding schedule, eligibility, intake, and document constraints, as well as failures to preserve valid retrieved resources in the final recommendation. Trait-level analysis further shows that different non-ideal behaviors stress different parts of the referral pipeline. Food4All provides a controlled testbed for studying tool-calling

Food is central to life. Food provides us with energy and foundational building blocks for our body and is also a major source of joy and new experiences. A significant part of the overall economy is related to food. Food science, distribution, processing, and consumption have been addressed by different communities using silos of computational approaches. In this paper, we adopt a person-centric multimedia and multimodal perspective on food computing and show how multimedia and food computing are synergistic and complementary. Enjoying food is a truly multimedia experience involving sight, taste, smell, and even sound, that can be captured using a multimedia food logger. The biological response to food can be captured using multimodal data streams using available wearable devices. Central to this approach is the Personal Food Model. Personal Food Model is the digitized representation of the food-related characteristics of an individual. It is designed to be used in food recommendation systems to provide eating-related recommendations that improve the user's quality of life. To model the food-related characteristics of each person, it is essential to capture their food-related enjo

We present Implicit-Scale 3D Reconstruction from Monocular Multi-Food Images, a benchmark dataset designed to advance geometry-based food portion estimation in realistic dining scenarios. Existing dietary assessment methods largely rely on single-image analysis or appearance-based inference, including recent vision-language models, which lack explicit geometric reasoning and are sensitive to scale ambiguity. This benchmark reframes food portion estimation as an implicit-scale 3D reconstruction problem under monocular observations. To reflect real-world conditions, explicit physical references and metric annotations are removed; instead, contextual objects such as plates and utensils are provided, requiring algorithms to infer scale from implicit cues and prior knowledge. The dataset emphasizes multi-food scenes with diverse object geometries, frequent occlusions, and complex spatial arrangements. The benchmark was adopted as a challenge at the MetaFood 2025 Workshop, where multiple teams proposed reconstruction-based solutions. Experimental results show that while strong vision--language baselines achieve competitive performance, geometry-based reconstruction methods provide both i

Food image classification serves as a fundamental and critical step in image-based dietary assessment, facilitating nutrient intake analysis from captured food images. However, existing works in food classification predominantly focuses on predicting 'food types', which do not contain direct nutritional composition information. This limitation arises from the inherent discrepancies in nutrition databases, which are tasked with associating each 'food item' with its respective information. Therefore, in this work we aim to classify food items to align with nutrition database. To this end, we first introduce VFN-nutrient dataset by annotating each food image in VFN with a food item that includes nutritional composition information. Such annotation of food items, being more discriminative than food types, creates a hierarchical structure within the dataset. However, since the food item annotations are solely based on nutritional composition information, they do not always show visual relations with each other, which poses significant challenges when applying deep learning-based techniques for classification. To address this issue, we then propose a multi-stage hierarchical framework fo

We present MM-Food-100K, a public 100,000-sample multimodal food intelligence dataset with verifiable provenance. It is a curated approximately 10% open subset of an original 1.2 million, quality-accepted corpus of food images annotated for a wide range of information (such as dish name, region of creation). The corpus was collected over six weeks from over 87,000 contributors using the Codatta contribution model, which combines community sourcing with configurable AI-assisted quality checks; each submission is linked to a wallet address in a secure off-chain ledger for traceability, with a full on-chain protocol on the roadmap. We describe the schema, pipeline, and QA, and validate utility by fine-tuning large vision-language models (ChatGPT 5, ChatGPT OSS, Qwen-Max) on image-based nutrition prediction. Fine-tuning yields consistent gains over out-of-box baselines across standard metrics; we report results primarily on the MM-Food-100K subset. We release MM-Food-100K for publicly free access and retain approximately 90% for potential commercial access with revenue sharing to contributors.

Deep learning-based food recognition has made significant progress in predicting food types from eating occasion images. However, two key challenges hinder real-world deployment: (1) continuously learning new food classes without forgetting previously learned ones, and (2) handling the long-tailed distribution of food images, where a few common classes and many more rare classes. To address these, food recognition methods should focus on long-tailed continual learning. In this work, We introduce a dataset that encompasses 186 American foods along with comprehensive annotations. We also introduce three new benchmark datasets, VFN186-LT, VFN186-INSULIN and VFN186-T2D, which reflect real-world food consumption for healthy populations, insulin takers and individuals with type 2 diabetes without taking insulin. We propose a novel end-to-end framework that improves the generalization ability for instance-rare food classes using a knowledge distillation-based predictor to avoid misalignment of representation during continual learning. Additionally, we introduce an augmentation technique by integrating class-activation-map (CAM) and CutMix to improve generalization on instance-rare food cl

The increasing interest in computer vision applications for nutrition and dietary monitoring has led to the development of advanced 3D reconstruction techniques for food items. However, the scarcity of high-quality data and limited collaboration between industry and academia have constrained progress in this field. Building on recent advancements in 3D reconstruction, we host the MetaFood Workshop and its challenge for Physically Informed 3D Food Reconstruction. This challenge focuses on reconstructing volume-accurate 3D models of food items from 2D images, using a visible checkerboard as a size reference. Participants were tasked with reconstructing 3D models for 20 selected food items of varying difficulty levels: easy, medium, and hard. The easy level provides 200 images, the medium level provides 30 images, and the hard level provides only 1 image for reconstruction. In total, 16 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The solutions developed in this challenge achieved promising results in 3D food reconstruction, with significant potential for improving portion estimation for dietary assessment and nutritional monitoring. More details about this workshop challenge a

In the European Union, official food safety monitoring data collected by member states are submitted to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and published on Zenodo. This data includes 392 million analytical results derived from over 15.2 million samples covering more than 4,000 different types of food products, offering great opportunities for artificial intelligence to analyze trends, predict hazards, and support early warning systems. However, the current format with data distributed across approximately 1000 files totaling several hundred gigabytes hinders accessibility and analysis. To address this, we introduce the CompreHensive European Food Safety (CHEFS) database, which consolidates EFSA monitoring data on pesticide residues, veterinary medicinal product residues, and chemical contaminants into a unified and structured dataset. We describe the creation and structure of the CHEFS database and demonstrate its potential by analyzing trends in European food safety monitoring data from 2000 to 2024. Our analyses explore changes in monitoring activities, the most frequently tested products, which products were most often non-compliant and which contaminants were most often

Sustainable Recipes is a tool that (1) connects food recipes ingredient lists with the closest organic providers to minimize the distance that food travels from farm to food preparation site and (2) recommends recipes given a GPS coordinate to minimize food miles. Sustainable Recipes provides consumers, entrepreneurs, cooking enthusiasts, and restauranteurs in the United States and elsewhere with an easy to use interface to help them (1) connect with organic ingredient producers to source ingredients to produce food recipes minimizing food miles and (2) recommend recipes using locally grown food. The main academic contribution of Sustainable Recipes is to bridge the gap between two streams of literature in data science of food recipes: studies of food recipes and studies of food supply chains. The outcomes of the interphase are (1) a map visualization that highlights the location of the producers that can supply the ingredients for a food recipe along with a ticket consisting of their contact addresses and the food miles used to produce a recipe and (2) a list of recipes that minimize food miles for a given GPS coordinate in which the recipe is going to be produced.

Access to finance is vital for improving food security, particularly in developing nations where agricultural production is crucial. Despite several financial interventions targeted at increasing agricultural production, smallholder farmers continue to lack access to reasonable, timely, and sufficient financing, limiting their ability to invest in improved technology and inputs, lowering productivity and food supply. This study examines the relationship between access to finance and food security among smallholder farmers in Ogun State, employing institutional theory as a theoretical framework. The study takes a quantitative method, with a survey for the research design and a population of 37,200 agricultural smallholder farmers. A sample size of 380 was chosen using probability sampling and simple random techniques. The data were analysed via Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). The findings demonstrate a favourable relationship between access to finance and food security, with an R2-value of 0.615 indicating a robust link. These findings underline the need of improving financial institutions and implementing enabling policies to enable farmers have acces

This paper presents an ontology design along with knowledge engineering, and multilingual semantic reasoning techniques to build an automated system for assimilating culinary information for Indian food in the form of a knowledge graph. The main focus is on designing intelligent methods to derive ontology designs and capture all-encompassing knowledge about food, recipes, ingredients, cooking characteristics, and most importantly, nutrition, at scale. We present our ongoing work in this workshop paper, describe in some detail the relevant challenges in curating knowledge of Indian food, and propose our high-level ontology design. We also present a novel workflow that uses AI, LLM, and language technology to curate information from recipe blog sites in the public domain to build knowledge graphs for Indian food. The methods for knowledge curation proposed in this paper are generic and can be replicated for any domain. The design is application-agnostic and can be used for AI-driven smart analysis, building recommendation systems for Personalized Digital Health, and complementing the knowledge graph for Indian food with contextual information such as user information, food biochemist

Accurate prediction of food delivery times significantly impacts customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and profitability in food delivery services. However, existing studies primarily utilize static historical data and often overlook dynamic, real-time contextual factors crucial for precise prediction, particularly in densely populated Indian cities. This research addresses these gaps by integrating real-time contextual variables such as traffic density, weather conditions, local events, and geospatial data (restaurant and delivery location coordinates) into predictive models. We systematically compare various machine learning algorithms, including Linear Regression, Decision Trees, Bagging, Random Forest, XGBoost, and LightGBM, on a comprehensive food delivery dataset specific to Indian urban contexts. Rigorous data preprocessing and feature selection significantly enhanced model performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the LightGBM model achieves superior predictive accuracy, with an R2 score of 0.76 and Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 20.59, outperforming traditional baseline approaches. Our study thus provides actionable insights for improving logistics strategie

Mathematical models are increasingly a part of microbiological research. Here, we share our perspective on how modeling advances the discipline by: (i) enforcing logical consistency, (ii) enabling quantitative prediction, (iii) extracting hidden parameters from data, and (iv) generating intuitive understanding. We map a spectrum of modeling frameworks, from whole-cell simulations to minimal logistic growth equations, and provide interactive examples for some common frameworks. Building on this overview, we outline pragmatic criteria for choosing an appropriate level of description to capture phenomena of interest. Finally, we present a case study in modeling of microbial ecosystems from our own work to illustrate how mechanistic modeling can yield generalizable intuition. This perspective aims to be an introductory roadmap for integrating mathematical modeling into experimental microbiology.

This paper addresses the challenges of learning representations for recipes and food images in the cross-modal retrieval problem. As the relationship between a recipe and its cooked dish is cause-and-effect, treating a recipe as a text source describing the visual appearance of a dish for learning representation, as the existing approaches, will create bias misleading image-and-recipe similarity judgment. Specifically, a food image may not equally capture every detail in a recipe, due to factors such as the cooking process, dish presentation, and image-capturing conditions. The current representation learning tends to capture dominant visual-text alignment while overlooking subtle variations that determine retrieval relevance. In this paper, we model such bias in cross-modal representation learning using causal theory. The causal view of this problem suggests ingredients as one of the confounder sources and a simple backdoor adjustment can alleviate the bias. By causal intervention, we reformulate the conventional model for food-to-recipe retrieval with an additional term to remove the potential bias in similarity judgment. Based on this theory-informed formulation, we empirically

The dramatic increase in consumption of ultra-processed food has been associated with numerous adverse health effects. Given the public health consequences linked to ultra-processed food consumption, it is highly relevant to build computational models to predict the processing of food products. We created a range of machine learning, deep learning, and NLP models to predict the extent of food processing by integrating the FNDDS dataset of food products and their nutrient profiles with their reported NOVA processing level. Starting with the full nutritional panel of 102 features, we further implemented coarse-graining of features to 65 and 13 nutrients by dropping flavonoids and then by considering the 13-nutrient panel of FDA, respectively. LGBM Classifier and Random Forest emerged as the best model for 102 and 65 nutrients, respectively, with an F1-score of 0.9411 and 0.9345 and MCC of 0.8691 and 0.8543. For the 13-nutrient panel, Gradient Boost achieved the best F1-score of 0.9284 and MCC of 0.8425. We also implemented NLP based models, which exhibited state-of-the-art performance. Besides distilling nutrients critical for model performance, we present a user-friendly web server

Microorganisms are ubiquitous in nature, and microbial activities are closely intertwined with the entire life cycle system and human life. Developing novel technologies for the detection, characterization and manipulation of microorganisms promotes their applications in clinical, environmental and industrial areas. Over the last two decades, terahertz (THz) technology has emerged as a new optical tool for microbiology. The great potential originates from the unique advantages of THz waves including the high sensitivity to water and inter-/intra-molecular motions, the non-invasive and label-free detecting scheme, and their low photon energy. THz waves have been utilized as a stimulus to alter microbial functions, or as a sensing approach for quantitative measurement and qualitative differentiation. This review specifically focuses on recent research progress of THz technology applied in the field of microbiology, including two major parts of THz biological effects and the microbial detection applications. In the end of this paper, we summarize the research progress and discuss the challenges currently faced by THz technology in microbiology, along with potential solutions. We also