U.S. Semantic Technologies Symposium Series
Dec 09 - Innovations in Food Informatics Research
Details about Session 5, chaired by Hande Küçük McGinty and Muhammad (Tuan) Amith:
Commitee Member : Kathleen Jagodnik
Food Informatics represents a rapidly expanding intersection of semantic technologies, nutrition research, and data science, with the aim to extract food-related knowledge from data. This session will explore how semantic interoperability, knowledge graphs, and AI-driven reasoning can enhance the integration and interpretation of diverse food-related data—from nutritional composition and dietary intake to metabolic, behavioral, and environmental datasets. Session presentations will showcase emerging research that applies ontologies, linked data, and FAIR data principles to unify fragmented information across domains such as precision nutrition, food systems modeling, and public health surveillance. By emphasizing standards-based approaches to data representation and reasoning, this session will highlight how Food Informatics can support reproducible research, scalable AI models, and evidence-based decision-making. Discussion will also address the technical and ethical challenges of connecting heterogeneous food and health data within open and privacy-preserving infrastructures. This session will feature two keynote speakers, lightning talks introducing a related poster session, and a collaborative session in which a Perspective Article or Review Paper on Food Informatics will be developed. We will conclude with a plenary discussion to recap the collaborative session, and consider future directions to advance the field of Food Informatics.