Picture perfect plates

Whether they are surfing the web in search of surf and turf, or browsing for the perfect grass-fed beef burger, more than 90 percent of U.S. consumers search online for restaurants, according to a study by market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey. Helping tech-savvy, would-be diners get a better picture of what might actually end up on their plates was the aim of a group of students in the computational science and engineering master's program offered by the Institute for Applied Computational Science (IACS) at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. They worked with TripAdvisor to make the travel website's restaurant photos more relevant for visitors. TripAdvisor images, the bulk of which are uploaded directly by the worldwide community of reviewers, are not currently sorted by the website, so there is no rhyme or reason to the photos that appear when a user clicks on a restaurant listing. "Our ultimate goal is to present the user with a very curated list of authentic, real images that give a good impression of what the restaurant and the food actually look like," Spiegelberg explained.