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Fighting Food Poisoning In Las Vegas With Machine Learning
aarondubrow writes: Computer science researchers from the University of Rochester developed an app for health departments that uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence to identify likely food poisoning hot spots. Las Vegas health officials recently used the app, called nEmesis, to improve the city's inspection protocols and found it was 63% more effective at identifying problematic venues than the current state of the art. The researchers estimate that if every inspection in Las Vegas became adaptive, it could prevent over 9,000 cases of foodborne illness and 557 hospitalizations annually. The team presented the results at the 30th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference in February.
It ruins the experience if I can't let the world know.
How dare they use complaints to find and shut down the business of hard working food poisoners!
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The cruise ships should get some benefits from this though.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
We must all unite and fight this.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I remember the University of Rochester was known for having one of the leading AI and optics research departments in the US . Kudos to them here.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
emesis /emsis/
noun technical
the action or process of vomiting.
Someone has a sense of humor at the University of Rochester!
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Do we really need an artificially intelligent app to tell us not to eat the comp'd seafood?
Next you'll be saying I should avoid the gas station sushi that I got free with a fill up!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
And why are so many ethnic restaurants located right next to animal clinics?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Can you tell us the name of your tin-foil supplier?
My father used to say that Mexican or Chinese restaurants are usually located next door to animal hospitals... the scary thing is how often it turns out to be true once you start looking for it!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Wow, next you're going to tell me that the police have a vested interest in not eliminating crime... although John Oliver did mention a certain Fire Special District that spent a lot of money on Fireworks... hmmm...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The health department doesn't profit from food poisoning. Responding to suspected food poisoning is an expensive use of their scarce resources; they'd much rather be on the enforcement side doing inspections, preventing outbreaks so they don't have to react to them.
But you're right, an "I'm Sick" app might be a great way to help researchers pinpoint food-borne illness vectors. I've read that they've been data mining various social media sites to try to track back some of the previous infections at places like Chipotle. This would just be another tool in the shed. Assuming people use it, of course.
John
In what way are 'tea leafs' better than random chance? In a blind, controlled study, this performed 63% better than random. What is the increase for your 'tea leafs'? Do you have any idea what you are talking about?
No, but you might want to avoid that egg salad sandwich from the vending machine in the spaceport men's room...
Hell, the cheap surf-n-turf used to be one of the best reasons to vacation in Las Vegas.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It's las vegas. Everyone there believes they can beat the odds. Come on, try the suchi. What are the odds you'll get sick? Are you chicken, Colonel Sanders?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
>The most important distinction, however, is between
restaurants with minor violations (grades A and B) and those
posing considerable health risks (grade C and worse). nEme-
sis uncovers 11 venues in the latter category, whereas control
finds only 7, a 64% improvement.
They found 4 (count 'em FOUR) more restaurants than the control and conclude
>Given the ambiguity of online data, it may appear hope-
less to identify problematic restaurants fully automatically.
However, we demonstrate that nEmesis uncovers signifi-
cantly more problematic restaurants than current inspection
processes
FOUR more than the control is NOT significant in light of the fact that they inspected 142 venues and found only FOUR more violations than the controlled experiment AND they cite the fact that they found an illegal venue running without a permit that would've never been inspected anyway. (Which is both a pro or con depending on how you look at it - pro because it wouldn't have been found otherwise, con because that's a problem that should be discovered by any beat cop on the strip.
Lastly, the entire concept relies on social media and voluntary data collection which is incredibly flakey and prone to social attitudes of the day. I bet this system would've worked even better using foursquare (maybe even yelp) but those apps have fallen by the wayside and twitter will too. What's the critical mass that requires statistical suppositions to target a potential venue for an inspection? 5 complaints? 2? 1? At that point the process becomes subject to trolling and hacking. (Let alone generational and geographical effects about the type of tweets that get posted.)
It's a novel approach - but it's long term effectiveness is highly doubtful.
Nice Philip J. Fry ref., but it was an interstellar truck stop...
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/c47926/futurama-wormy-discovery
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
You want to avoid the "Space Special" too.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
No, but you might want to avoid that egg salad sandwich from the vending machine in the spaceport men's room...
Especially with the homemade mayo on it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Wouldn't this all be much simpler if we just made the hotels and casinos pay the affected guests' hospital bills? And if necessary add punitive fines so that poisoning guests is more expensive that just paying kitchen workers a decent living wage, keeping the kitchens clean, and following basic food safety rules.
Confirmation bias, plus a common third factor: both Chinese restaurants and animal hospitals seek low-cost commercial real estate, so they end up in strip malls.
"...uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence to identify likely food poisoning hot spots."
I don't need an app for that. It's the free buffets in casinos and strip clubs where people touch the serving utensils with their (unwashed after bathroom use) hands and where droplets of sniffles, coughs and sneezes are spread over the food.