Panel - Multimodal Food Computing: Bridging Cultural Heritage, Artificial Intelligence, and Sustainable Food Futures

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) - spanning computer vision, natural language processing, large language models, causal machine learning, and intelligent agents - together with data from wearable sensors, mobile devices, internet sources, official guidelines, and multimodal content such as speech, text, images, and videos, are enabling a more holistic understanding of food that goes far beyond nutrition. These rich and complex data streams create opportunities to advance health, sustainability, and cultural identity, while also raising challenges of heterogeneity, standardization, interoperability, scalability, transparency, bias, and cultural sensitivity. This panel, Multimodal Food Computing: Bridging Cultural Heritage, Artificial Intelligence, and Sustainable Food Futures, will explore emerging trends, challenges, and applications. Topics include multimodal representations of food, cultural preservation, translating data into actionable insights, and trustworthy AI. Panelists from leading institutions will share perspectives in an interactive discussion, aiming to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration and responsible innovation.