Google and Harvard develop AI to find restaurants that could make you sick

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. "Foodborne illnesses are common, costly, and land thousands of Americans in emergency rooms every year. This new technique, developed by Google, can help restaurants and local health departments find problems more quickly, before they become bigger public health problems," Ashish Jha, K.T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard Chan School and director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said.