in the studio. We're here today to talk about the Internet of Food and perhaps you've heard of the Internet of Things. Well this is something similar and to talk to us today about it is Matthew Lang who is the principal investigator of IC Food and could you please explain to us what that stands for Matthew. Sure so IC Foods is the International Center for Food Ontology, Operability, Data, and Semantics which is kind of a mouthful. Yeah it's a mouthful I see why you shorten it to IC Food. Yeah. Now each of those words perhaps they're not all familiar to our audience so let's start with ontology what is that? Right so and how does it relate? Sure so ontology that's probably probably the hardest word to get in that in that acronym there. It's basically a language that we can use to compute over. So computers you know philosophers often talk about ontology as the way to express a person's world view or the world view of a community and computer engineers have taken that same term and used it in computer science to mean something very specific which is the actual all of the words that people use to describe a knowledge domain and when we take those words and we come up with a set of preferred terms and dictionaries of synonyms and things like that then we can actually compute over that language so when we talk about food ontology we're actually talking about making a language about food that we can compute over. And this is a global effort correct? Indeed it is yeah it's it's an international center actually there's there's three seeds three C's in the acronym Icy Foods so sometimes the C stands for the International Center sometimes it stands for the International Conference and we also have an international consortium of non-profits and government organizations non-government organizations like the United Nations as well as for-profit companies. And so they're all coming together to develop a common language around food so that we can improve the human health and nutrition through agriculture and animal husbandry. Right so so the second O in Icy Foods is operability and so when we come up with a common language we actually make data that's produced by different people whether you're a farmer or whether your food distributor or whether you're a chef or whether you're you know selling food in a store to make that a common language that we can compare data sets and enable computation across the entire knowledge spectrum that spans from the environment to agriculture to essentially food itself to diet and then health. Okay that's there was another term in there right we had operability right and the next one was data which that's pretty self-explanatory. And then the last one is S for semantics and so semantics really talk about how do these words interoperate what are the relationships between the terms so when we talk about ontologies back to that word and building these computational vocabularies we also need to talk about the relationships between terms so maybe it's we talk about how a protein breaks into specific peptides and those peptides maybe can help certain bacteria in your in your gut grow or maybe we're talking about the way different metrics of sustainability are related to specific growing practices or food processing practices things like that. So being able to use those language terms standardized terms and their relationships that's what enables us to compute over all of this data. Okay and this conference you mentioned the conference you just recently had IC foods conference I guess the first first one ever inaugural conference yeah and it's kind here at UC Davis here in Davis California and you had something 70 speakers right we had 71 to be precise and yeah it was it was really a great showing it exceeded I think all of our expectations and to be quite honest you know we we had a sense that we knew this needed to be done that that that there were issues out there and and my my co-investigators on the project the people who are on the grant with me to get this started they span environment ag food diet and health so I have Tom Tomich who runs the Ag Sustainability Institute on campus and Jim Quinn who runs the Information Center for the Environment as well as Nick Anderson who is the head of research informatics at the UC Davis School of Medicine so we between the four of us we sort of span that entire and I'm a food scientist myself so you know we we span that spectrum that knowledge spectrum and can each identify practice areas where data is emerging as you said from the Internet of Things that essentially would be appropriate to tag with specific vocabulary terms so you're trying to get everyone not necessarily out of their silo but get everybody together started agreeing on how common terms are going to be used and how we're going to analyze this data so that everybody can benefit I would say necessarily out of their silo absolutely yeah we we we that was that was the need we saw to to go back to this idea about the conference sort of taking off we saw this need to to get folks out of their silos to enable transdisciplinary research to enable you know better commerce to enable people to let loose with artificial intelligence that can at once give you know predict recipes maybe that would be optimal food that will be optimal for you maybe that you like to eat that tastes good that is also produced sustainably and that also meets your exact nutrient requirements so my personal area of interest in this whole Internet of Food Things is personalized foods and personalized diets and we can't do that with siloed information we can only do that if we break down the silos and the first step in breaking down the silos is this this common language excellent so let's talk a little bit about some of the speakers and the topics you had these are all all they were all recorded they yeah and then they'll all be up online yeah and they're all they'll all be up online so my understanding is you had some people come in from Europe as well as domestically which we'll get to but Michael Becker is that my pronouncing Michael Bacher yeah right right right I'm not great with the years so actually he's originally he was from Google food he's from Google food right but actually he's Dutch so right so you know Google has an interesting proposition where you know they feed essentially a hundred thousand people every day three times a day right they have to feed their employees and let's face it you know Google wants to feed their employees well and they want to be sustainable so here we have one of the you know largest companies in the world who wants to do things right and quite frankly they're in the middle of a talent war as they call it in Silicon Valley right and you know paying your programmer your top level programmers you know $20,000 extra a year doesn't really mean much compared to making sure they have awesome food and that their experience at work is amazing so so it's interesting that that we're seeing food become this value proposition in these large companies now in a way that it never really was before I mean if you if you imagine taking $20,000 from a bunch of employees and putting it all towards food then you're gonna actually be able to develop pretty amazing food experiences and so and health well that's that's part of the the food experience is is eating something that you know is going to be good for you and you know I mentioned that personalized foods and nutrition is is what I'm most interested in and you can imagine that there are a lot of variables that go into that equation so you know maybe you know you have your own set of values about maybe maybe you don't care if something's organic maybe you do but maybe you really care if there were extra you know phosphates put into the environment maybe you care about the water use maybe you know maybe you have certain things that you personally care about you know maybe you have a genetic predisposition to to in for instance I I make kidney stones I'm a I'm a kidney stone factory and and you know people want to tell me that spinach is good for me and you know as much as I love this stuff I have to say no so so we're getting past this idea where there's a healthy food that's healthy for everybody right so I don't care whether your your diet is the paleo or the neo or the south beach or the north beach or the whatever it is every diet is wrong for somebody right except the diet that's right for them and figuring out how we can do that and how we can do that at a scale I think is is it's critical for for advancing human health and and so that's just one of the sort of the value propositions that okay let's see let's talk about a few of the other guests you had you also had well you mentioned the corporate involvement and Google was there but there's also I have trouble with these but Scott May from sure he's got the easiest name to pronounce yeah but the company is Gia Vaughton yeah so they they're a French company and they are one of the top flavor houses in the world so this company is very unique in that they work with ingredient companies as well as food companies which are separate things and I can talk about that in a minute and they develop specific flavors for these companies so that they can deliver consistent food products you know one of the mantras in in food science and technology and in packaged foods in general is to deliver consistency and so in order to do that you need to make sure that you know if the if the the strawberries you harvested for your jam or something don't taste the same as the strawberries you got you know last spring how are you going to amend that how are you going to ensure that those flavors come come to come together in the same way and what can you do to manipulate that and that's what that's where a flavor house gets involved and that also demonstrates how broad the topic is that I mean right yeah this isn't just you know a micro science and nutrients and things like that it's a the whole ecosystem right you also had another guest was now this one is an Indian name I believe well maybe wrong with should she teased Shaba she teased Shaba yeah and honestly I don't know where he's from yeah but he I mean he's he's the I believe he's the senior vice president for research and development at DSM and they are the the world's largest vitamin maker and the first or second largest ingredient company in the world and and so they're really looking at this evolving internet of food and this desire to have a common language to to enable more commerce right so essentially to to reduce the friction and enable sort of online transactions in ways that honestly we haven't even thought of yet and I mean imagine you know it wasn't that long ago that we came up with hypertext markup language right I mean it was it was within our lifetimes yeah right and and so basically now what we're talking about is is essentially with these ontologies and the semantics and and everything we're essentially talking about creating the food equivalent a hyperfood markup language if you will and and so if you can imagine the the amount of commerce that has been built on the internet as a result of HTML right and now we consider being able to to look at food as it moves entirely through the again the ag food diet health knowledge spectrum and transaction spectrum there are so many efficiencies that yet to be gained and and ways to improve it we we just can't even think of them yet okay but we know that they're out there you also had Brad Fenwick who is a right right senior VP for for a company that produces you says the world's largest information company well so you know what I'm not sure how we measure that thing right but they're certainly up there right and so Brad Fenwick is the senior vice president of global affairs for Elsevier and they're a very large publishing company scientific publishing company and so they have many different academic journals that scientists will publish their information in and so what we're able to do by partnering with them by them coming in and being part of the the International Consortium is to give us tools to mine the academic literature so so that we can actually compare data sets between authors and and and scientists and then use that scientific data essentially for commercial purposes to enable all new kinds of businesses around personalized foods personalized diets more sustainability I mean one of the things that you know we're doing here is we're enabling businesses to essentially compete to make people healthier to compete to make the environment better we're giving them a standardized vocabulary upon which they can develop metrics and and turn that into a value proposition right now food is basically you know and and has been packaged foods in particular have been as we say valorized or you know value added component mostly around flavor and convenience and and so when you go shopping at the store you buy based on things you know that you like and how convenient is it and those are the two ways that that company sort of gets you and we don't have any real metrics on how good is it for you right and we try and the USDA you know tries in the FDA they try to regulate health claims around foods but the only vocabularies that we have to use to to see whether they're actually performing well are disease-based vocabularies from the medical industry but the disease-based vocabularies don't talk about health improvement they talk about disease and it was sort of one example of that is there is a the National Institute of Health has compiled a this thing that called the UMLS the unified medical language system and that they they bring in vocabularies from physicians from physical therapists from nurses from people all across the medical spectrum psychologist the DSM which is a diagnostic service manager for psychiatrists psychologists all these vocabularies hundreds of vocabularies and if we look through that and we see the number of terms that there are ways that people use the word depression right so everyone's defining it a little differently right defining a little differently and they try to bring it all together in this unified medical language so if we look at the for the term depression there's there's over a thousand entries for the word depression if we look for the word happiness there's 15 ways to describe happiness and 13 of those are related to unhappiness so so we don't have vocabularies to describe health and happiness we have vocabularies to describe diseases and drugs and diagnoses because that's where all the profits being made and so what we're saying is let's give people a language where we can actually have people competing instead of competing around drugs and diseases and diagnoses let's have them competing around making people happier and healthier and more sustainable and so that's one of the sort of the big push the big positive outcome you're looking yeah absolutely right why not have people competing on that ground instead of on the other you know I just actually we heard this morning a similar argument about changing the definition of a non-profit why define it in terms of a negative rather than what they're trying to do which is I guess the new thing they would like is a mission oriented which is a bit of a mouthful they'll have to come up with something shorter but yeah it's a similar mo defined in terms of positive goals rather than in the negative of oh it's what we don't want right so that's pretty interesting you had we'll mention a few other speakers here that you had there so that the audience can get an idea of the broad topics that we're covering you also had Susan Lewis who is with with Lawrence Berkeley National Labs right so and so so Susie Susie and her group at Lawrence Berkeley they're really providing a model for us to follow so she leads she's the principal investigator for the open biological ontologies consortium or oboe as it's known and so they already have hundreds of vocabularies that are part of this sort of oboe foundry that describe all kinds of phenomena within biology and computational scientists and biologists are using these vocabularies all over the world and so they have a really nice model to talk about biology but as you know food is part biology but it's you know it's also part chemistry and also when we talk about the food supply we talk about transportation systems we talk about refrigeration systems things that aren't necessarily biological so as the icy foods consortium essentially gets off the ground we're we're we're looking to the oboe foundry as a model for how to come up with essentially guidelines for developing ontologies around food and integrating them with other food ontology and integrating them with the the oboe ontologies as well okay and you also had some some of these people are international but also domestic you had government representatives there correct as well right absolutely we have had support from government at the highest levels we had Parag Chitnis who is the deputy director for the National Institute for Food and Ag gave a great keynote address on the first day and really set the stage for you know the USDA is really thinking very forward and positively about this about how we can align their mission with this broader sort of mission to essentially provide a new way to do commerce and likewise Karen Ross the California Secretary of Ag gave the keynote on the second day of the conference and similarly you know California leads the way in terms of agriculture with a number of specialty crops that we produce more than any other state so we have a you know there's no better place to be doing this essentially than here in here yeah okay well we're running out of time so this is obviously a huge topic and I'm going to be bringing you some more information more shows on this in the future but if you'd like to listen to any of the videos or watch the videos and listen to them you can go to icfoods.org and there's links there there's the links to what the conference is about the videos the speakers the keynotes transcripts all sorts of information right and we'll be back in the future with more on this and more on the the ways it's trickling down to the down to the startup level even right as well as these high level discussions that are going just to organize the information so I'd like to thank you Matthew thanks for having me it's been pleasure thank you for watching another episode of in the studio