What happens when artificial intelligence meets the art of cooking?
At IIIT-Delhi, professor Ganesh Bagler has been exploring that intersection for more than a decade, giving birth to what he calls ‘computational gastronomy’ — a pioneering field that uses data science and AI to decode and recreate the science of taste.
“It all started as a curiosity-driven classroom exercise when I was teaching at IIT Jodhpur,” Bagler recalled in an interview with PTI.
“We were studying patterns in global cuisines — Indian, Italian, Mexican — and I realised that no one really looked at food through the lens of data and computation. That’s how the journey began, around 10 years ago.
Since then, Bagler’s lab at IIIT-Delhi has been at the forefront of blending two seemingly contrasting worlds — the artistic, cultural side of cooking and the quantitative precision of data science.
No one had tried to merge these two domains before, he said.
Over the years, Bagler and his team have built structure