Abstract:
In order to address the prevalence and increasing threat of diet-related diseases like obesity, hypertension, and diabetes in India, it has become necessary to build frameworks for tracking the dietary nutrition of food consumption among Indians. The Personalized Health Navigators can provide an effective and efficient solution to these problems provided adequate knowledge about Indian food and nutrition is digitally available and easy mechanisms are created to capture what people are eating on a regular basis. Hence, we are building a culinary platform for Indian food with associated ontologies, knowledge graph, and intelligence to digitally capture all-encompassing knowledge about food, recipe, ingredients, processes, and most importantly nutrition. In this talk, we start with discussing the diversity of food, culture and languages in India to elucidate some of the key challenges of building a culinary platform for Indian food and nutrition. We delve into our work on 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. We also present a 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. We conclude with the varied directions of future work including development of a university cohort for food and nutrition, and mobile apps to capture what-you-eat and suggest what-you-should-eat.
Speaker’s bio:
Dr. Partha Pratim Das is a Visiting Professor at the Department of Computer Science and the Director of the Center of Data Science and Analytics at Ashoka University. He is on long leave from IIT Kharagpur where he is a Professor at the Department of CSE. Partha has over 24 years’ experience in teaching and research, and about 13 years’ experience in Software Industry. He has worked extensively in Digital Geometry, Smart Software Engineering, and Digital Heritage for academic research and EDA frontend automation and T & M tools in video technology as industrial products. Partha has been involved in R & D and education on impact projects using huge volumes of integrated and curated data and tools of AI. From 2015 to 2022, he initiated and led the National Digital Library of India Project of Ministry of Education, Government of India to create an open educational library having about 100 million+ free contents organized by educational needs of the users. He has also been developing curated repository of audios and videos for Indian Classical Dance (Bharatanatyam) for AI-driven research in modelling, preservation and tutoring. The repository has 50TB+ of 1200+ hours of annotated recordings and is used in dance research by several scholars. Since joining Ashoka in July 2022, Partha leads the initiative on the creation of a data lake at Ashoka which will host research data for climate, health, social and physical sciences, and others. Under the guidance of Prof. Ramesh Jain, Partha leads the Project on “Indian food knowledge graph for personalized digital health” – a culinary knowledge graph for Indian food with associated ontologies and intelligence to digitally capture all-encompassing knowledge about food, recipe, ingredients, processes, and most importantly nutrition. Its potential uses include personalized recommendations for diet to address the prevalence and increasing threat of diet-related diseases like obesity, hypertension, and diabetes in India.