Google Wants to Predict the Calories in Your Food

We’ve heard that Facebook is keen on finding talented people in the AI field by opening a new research lab in Paris, but what is Google up to with its own AI research? The latest news shows that Google is more interested in what you eat rather than where you take your photos.

Google revealed that it is working on a project called Im2Calories at the Rework Deep Learning Summit in Boston, where scientist Kevin Murphy revealed that they are working on predicting how many calories you have in your food. They want to achieve the latter by having an algorithm analyse a photo of your meal, but don’t think it’s as simple as distinguishing colours.

Murphy said that the app is still not accurate enough for distinguishing appropriate calories in meals, but he believes that if there’s a 30% chance of success rate, the app will be a success itself. It might not look as much, but a lot of data needs to be processed and adapted in order to shape the algorithm and have it give out more accurate results in the future.

Though Google filed a patent for its Im2Calories app, it is not yet quite clear when they plan on releasing it or if they even want to release it in the first place. However, Murphy added that the data from the app will prove to be very useful for bigger deep learning projects in the future. They plan on moving on to analysing traffic and predicting things like where the most likely parking spot is, specific details from cars that pass through an intersection and so on.

Thank you Popular Science for providing us with this information
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