Key takeaways
- Machine learning is being applied to culinary arts, enabling algorithms to generate pizza recipes.
- A joint research team developed a system using Generative Adversarial Networks to visualise pizza preparation steps.
- The system classifies toppings, removes them to reveal underlying ingredients, and infers their order.
Machine Learning has found its application in various parts of the industry. One of the toughest challenges for an intelligent system can be to build something sensible out of raw inputs — for example, the culinary arts. But what if a machine or an algorithm can compose and generate a recipe for you? This is exactly the question which was answered by a team of researchers from MIT and Qatar Computing Research Institute.
A joint team from these institutes worked on a machine learning system which can follow a recipe and make a pizza. The researchers looked at food preparation as following a set of instructions and also as changing how the food looks after adding a key ingredient or putting the food through a process. To achieve a system that can perceive food making as following a manual, the researchers compose operators that can add or remove ingredients from a dish. Each of the operators is actually a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) which predict how the food looks after every step.
The aim of the researcher is to build a model that will:
- Classify pizza toppings by using supervised learning
- Remove the toppings and show what is underneath the topping
- Infer the ordering of the pizza topping




