World Champion of Computer Cooking

"Empolis can cook!?" - Actually not, and Empolis is not in competition with television cooking shows, either. However, at this year's 2nd International Computer Cooking Contest (CCC), a virtual cooking contest in the realm of bits and bytes, Empolis did take part in the cooking by powering the prize winner with its award winning software. The event is designed to showcase what computers can do in an everyday discipline. The event, which recently took place at the International Conference for Case-Based Reasoning in Seattle, the "CookIIS" computer system, powered by Empolis won. The prize-winning system is based on the Empolis Research & Discovery solution and was developed by the University of Hildesheim. Empolis Research & Discovery was recently named as "Trend Setting Product of the Year 2009" by KMWorld.

During the CCC, teams are required to develop a software system that can compete with professional chefs in planning a menu that combines a pre-determined set of ingredients in a live contest. The initial input is a collection of cooking recipes. In a live show, the systems are challenged with previously unknown tasks and ingredients, the goal: make menu suggestions. The menus are evaluated and judged in the "live" event by an international jury, including professional chefs.

The final and decisive task in the 2009 competition was to provide a recipie for "pizza with leeks" and CookIIS faced the challenge successfully. In the database of 1,500 recipes, there was no recipe that fit this description completely. CookIIS selected the "No Meat Bean Burn Pizza." It proposed to adapt this recipe by replacing onions with leeks. This choice convinced the jury that the system's advanced technical capabilities could be used to make wise culinary choices, a winning outcome!

"Based on Empolis software, our team was able to develop CookIIS, an intelligent application that led us to win the Computer Cooking Contest. Empolis Research & Discovery is an unrivaled solution for the extraction and analysis of unstructured information", explains Prof. Dr. Klaus-Dieter Althoff, head of the research group "Intelligent Information Systems", which belongs to the institute of computer science of the University of Hildesheim.

The cooking example clearly depicts how computers are capable of transforming unstructured data into valuable information when powered by the right software. The achievements in the area of intelligently finding the answers to even indirect questions in cooking are transferrable to countless other application areas where users are attempting to sift through mountains of unstructured data for insights.

The Empolis Research and Discovery application is uniquely able to do this through it's advanced semantic features including Case Based Reasoning (CBR.) CBRis a machine learning method for problem resolution based on examples and analogy. In a database, previously solved problems are stored as cases. The system draws these examples to develop new solutions to new problems. Successfully solved problems and their solutions are then stored in the database for future reference.

For further information about the Computer Cooking Contest: www.computercookingcontest.net

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