IBM Watson Food Truck Rolls into SXSW

Today, tens of thousands of music fans, film buffs and technologists converge in Austin, Texas, for the annual South by Southwest Music Conference and Festival. This year's event brings together an eclectic group of musicians, filmmakers and speakers, from Lady Gaga to Robert Duvall to Chelsea Clinton.

And IBM would like to feed all of them.

The IBM Watson food truck, fresh off its debut at IBM's Pulse event, has made the 1,300 mile trek from Las Vegas and is ready to serve up recipes developed by IBM's Watson cognitive computer and a team of chefs from the Institute for Culinary Education in New York City. The truck will be at SXSW until March 11. If you are at SXSW, click here to track the location of the IBM Watson food truck.

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Anshul Sheopuri, manager of consumer modeling at the T.J. Watson Research Center and project lead for the food truck, said the goal behind the project was to push computing in a new direction.

'When we were exploring different domains to build our first proof point, we landed on food for a couple of reasons,' he said. 'One is that food is something that everybody eats, people understand what it's about. Also, there's a lot of domain knowledge about what makes food good, there have been a lot of empirical studies that can be leveraged to build such a system.'

Sheopuri said they decided to use a food truck because they wanted the project to be interactive.

'We wanted to be able to actually engage with consumers,' he said, 'gauge people's reactions and give people a sense of how we are engaging in the creative process through a programmatic approach.'

Michael Laiskonis, creative director at the Institute of Culinary Education, one of the chefs working on the food truck project, said he was intrigued by the idea of cooking with Watson.

'As a pastry chef, I have always been very interested in pursuing an organized analytical approach to creativity in the kitchen,' he said. 'So when approached by IBM, I was immediately interested in how a computer system might be able to assist a chef in helping to develop recipes based on ingredient combinations that perhaps we wouldn't come up with on our own.'

Like SXSW, the Watson food truck brings together a wide range of ingredients to produce interesting and unusual combinations. The menu may include dishes such as Swiss-Thai asparagus quiche, Turkish bruschetta and a Caymanian plantain dessert, but that depends on the will of the people. Attendees can suggest dishes on Twitter, and new menu items will be added each day based on those suggestions.

'They might come up with completely unconventional ideas,' Sheopuri said, but added that the chefs' ability to produce dishes based on those ideas will be limited by their ability to source ingredients at a moment's notice.

'That's part of the exciting thing, we don't know exactly what we are going to be cooking from day to day,' Laiskonis said. 'That's going to be decided by people plugging into social media. We have formed sort of a general, skeletal set of dishes, 10 to 12 dishes, that people are going to be voting on. So we are going to know, actually hopefully in a few hours, what we are going to be cooking tomorrow and we will go back and tighten up the idea with the system and start cooking and serving it at the food truck. So there's an element of surprise there.'

Scott Etkin is a managing editor at Data Informed. Email him at Scott.Etkin@wispubs.com.

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