I was recently invited to attend the UC Davis/Quadram International Collaboration on Biofortification, B12, and More, a collaboration between the UC Davis Department of Nutrition and the Quadram Institute, with the goal of increasing international collaboration to improve health through nutrition.

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I felt honored to be on a panel with such talented researchers. From left to right in the photo, they are Dr. Dragan Milenkovic, Dr. Edward Spang, Dr. Danielle Lemay, and Dr. Mariana Barboza.

The panel touched on some fascinating topics including:

  • How to improve dietary intake data collection and connect it to health outcomes
  • Depth vs. breadth tradeoffs in dietary intake and health data collection
  • The evolution of data silos and the continuing importance of high-resolution analyses in the age of general AI

For a while, NLP for food information extraction was my main research focus, and food and nutrition still spark a lot of curiosity for me. Nutrition is such a high-leverage way to improve human quality of life, and the current science has only scratched the surface. After switching paths to focus on LLMs and morality, it was refreshing to come back to talk to food folks, and get perspective from domain experts on recent progress in AI.

Many thanks to Dr. Danielle Lemay and the conference organizers for inviting me to participate!