The WUR Life Sciences hackathon on the 25 & 26th of October is a 32-hour long event to ignite data- and tech-driven collaborations across boundaries. Students, tech entrepreneurs, researchers, and domain experts work jointly on targeted challenges, side by side with representatives of leading Dutch agri-food businesses. In this blogpost Unilever presents the challenge they invite you to.
Taking stock of literature for future food flavours
Jan Koek: ‘we need better search for literature review’
“It was a somewhat obscure publication that I happened to run into, but it meant a breakthrough.” Unilever’s challenge “Taking stock of literature for future food flavours” relates to a personal experience of food chemist Jan Koek. Jan Koek acts as the spokesperson for the Unilever challenge.
In 2017, by mere coincidence, Koek came across a 1998 scientific publication that offered essential clues to a major project he worked on. The extensive literature reviews by the project had completely missed this article. Koek: “What else did we miss? There is an almost exponential growth of scientific publications, even in our in-company experimental and report databases. Scifinder and Google are not good enough, we need more specific search engines.”
There are not only too many complete misses (false negatives) as well as too many false positives. The idea of this challenge is to train AI to search better.
Koek, who has over 25 years of Unilever experience, will mentor and guide the team. His experience as a secondary school chemistry teacher might come in handy. He can evaluate the quality of search results as he is a Maillard specialist. There will also be data science expertise. Wendy van Herpen, Digital R&D director at Unilever, says: ”We want to strengthen these kind of collaborations beyond the boundaries of Unilever. This team and this challenge are not a one-off activity, but rather an open invitation to getting to know each other. Feel welcome to join our challenge!”