Google And Harvard Develop AI To Find Restaurants That Could Make You Sick

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Worried your go-to hole-in-the-wall might not have a stellar food safety record? Google’s new artificially intelligent (AI) system can help lay your fears to rest — or confirm the worst of them.

A study led by researchers at the Mountain View company and Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health describes a machine learning model — FINDER (Foodborne IllNess DEtector in Real time) — that leverages search and location data to identify “potentially unsafe” restaurants. Their paper (“Machine-learned epidemiology: real-time detection of foodborne illness at scale“) was published today in the journal npj Digital Medicine.