The Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford
Talitha Bromwich
Project title: AI-enhanced pipelines for estimating food product environmental footprints: advancing text and ingredient inference for sustainable food systems
The way we produce and consume food has enormous impacts on climate and biodiversity. But if you’re looking at products on shelf, how can you tell which is less environmentally damaging? Despite seeming like a simple question, it’s one that we still cannot answer for many food products.
Current environmental impact datasets operate at the level of around 120 food categories, but the UK market has more than 100,000 distinct products. At this scale, category averages conceal huge product-specific variation and make manual assessment impossible.
Talitha’s fellowship will apply machine learning approaches to improve our ability to estimate environmental footprints at the product level. To do this, she’ll focus on three areas: linking food products across different large diverse datasets, applying machine learning methods to estimate missing ingredient and environmental information where data are incomplete, and developing transparent, easy-to-use tools to support sustainable food and health research, including through the THRIVING Food Futures project.