Events
Food Alignment Forum 2026
On 27th February 2026, the Food Computing Lab hosted the inaugural Food Alignment Forum. The Forum emerged from a shared recognition that many of India’s food-related challenges persist not due to a lack of research, innovation, policy effort, or investment, but because food systems are fundamentally misaligned. Goals across domains diverge; data and decision frameworks remain fragmented; incentives often reward short-term efficiency over long-term human and ecological wellbeing; and food is treated as a linear supply chain, despite functioning as a complex, non-linear ecosystem where biological impact, agricultural practice, individual choice, and institutional design are deeply intertwined. The Food Alignment Forum was conceived as a space within Ashoka to begin bridging these fragments and treating food as an interconnected system. By examining the decision logics embedded within different disciplines, institutions, and decision frameworks—what is optimized by default, which assumptions remain unexamined, which trade-offs remain invisible, and how constraints shape choices—the Forum sought to surface where misalignments occur and where new forms of representation, collaboration, and inquiry could help.
Bringing together a small group of faculty and researchers from across the Ashoka community, the Forum enabled collective reflection on food as a complex system spanning health, ecology, nutrition, agriculture, culture, markets, and policy. While data, computation, and AI can offer new tools and perspectives, the most meaningful questions must emerge from deep disciplinary knowledge, lived experience, and sustained engagement with food systems across contexts. The Forum was therefore designed as an opportunity to listen, learn, and build understanding across disciplines, domains, and centres. The day-long gathering featured 13 discipline- and centre-specific work and perspectives on food systems, unstructured conversations, a roundtable discussion to map misalignment, and a collective sensemaking session. Rather than research presentations or solution proposals, the emphasis was on critical dialogue, interdisciplinary learning, and the cultivation of a sustained community that can identify collaborative directions for engaging with the multifaceted food challenges in the Indian context.
Disciplines: Sociology & Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Economics, Computer Science, Biology, History, and Psychology & Cognitive Sciences
Centres: Koita Centre for Digital Health at Ashoka University (KCDH-A), Centre for Social and Behaviour Change (CSBC), Ashoka Centre for a People-centric Energy Transition (ACPET), Centre for Health Analytics Research and Trends (CHART), HDFC Library Ashoka University, Centre for Data Science and Analytics (CDSA)
Participants: Prof. Bharat Ramaswamy, Prof. Devesh Roy, Prof. Amita Baviskar, Prof. Harish Naraindas, Prof. Meghna Agarwala, Prof. Bhismadev Chakrabarti, Prof. Projit Mukherjee, Prof. Sudipta Tung, Dr. Shantanu Ganguly, Prof. Santanu Chaudhury, Dr. Rintu Kutum, Padmini Vishwanath, Pallavi Dhall, Dr. Anandajit Goswami, Dr. Bahaar Meera Jain, Dr. Priya Dutta, Dr. Aditi Roy, Prof. Anirban Sen, Dr. Sarfraz Kasana
We are very thankful to Dr. Ramesh Jain (UC Irvine - Institute for Future Health), Dr. Mini Kachumbron (World Resources Institute), and Abul Kamar & Adnaan Shah (International Food Policy Research Institute) for joining us and enriching the discussion with their invaluable insights. We are especially grateful to Dr. Ramesh Jain for his vision and mentorship in shaping this forum. The Food Alignment Forum marks an important step toward deeper interdisciplinary engagement on food systems at Ashoka and beyond.
Recording: Zoom @ FAF'26Slides: Presentations @ FAF'26
The Forum was organized by: Prof. Partha Pratim Das, Prof. Lipika Dey, Prof. Geeta Trilok Kumar, and Saransh Kumar Gupta.
Supported by: Mphasis AI & Applied Tech Lab at Ashoka, Centre for Data Science and Analytics (CDSA)
INFUSE Innovation Summit 2025
The Food Computing Lab was recognised with a Promising Innovation Award at the Innovations in Nutrition & Food for Unified Solutions and Empowerment (INFUSE) Innovation Summit 2025 — organised by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)- National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad, on 4th–5th December 2025.
The team presented SmartDiet, India: A Unified Digital Framework for Accurate Dietary Data and Precision Nutrition — an end-to-end framework reimagining how dietary data is captured and applied for personalised nutrition in the Indian context, spanning work across FKG.in (a knowledge graph for Indian food), automating food composition analysis, food image analysis, recipe cataloguing, and automated food label analysis. This recognition is a testament to the power of collaborative, interdisciplinary research in addressing real-world challenges at the intersection of food, health, and technology.
The team comprised of:- Research & Presentation: Dr. Mayank Garg, Saransh Kumar Gupta
- Research Support: Dr. Yamini Gusain, Ankit Sharma, Reena Ladwal, Ankur Bhardwaj
- Supervision: Prof. Geeta Trilok - Kumar, Prof. Lipika Dey, Prof. Partha Pratim Das (PPD), Prof. Anurag Agrawal
ACM Multimedia: MMFood’25 Workshop
The 1st International Workshop on Multi-modal Food Computing (MMFood'25) was be held in conjunction with the 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACMMM25) in Dublin, Ireland, on 28th October 2025.
This MMFood’25 workshop explored the intersection of AI, computer vision, natural language processing, and sensory modeling in understanding food. It aims to advance multimodal methods for food recognition, recommendation, and analysis, addressing challenges in health, nutrition, and sustainability. By bringing together researchers from AI, food science, health informatics, computational social science, and human-computer interaction (HCI), this workshop fosters interdisciplinary collaboration to drive innovation in multimodal food computing.
The call for papers attracted submissions from India, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, Japan and the United States of America. A total of 18 papers were received, of which, 8 were accepted as full papers and 5 as short papers. The Keynote Talk was presented by Dr. Ganesh Bagler (Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (India)) on 'Computational Gastronomy: Making Food Computable' and the Invite Talk was presented by Dr. Adarsh Nadig (Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, London (UK)) on 'There is Nothing Artificial About Taste Intelligence'. The Panel Discussion comprised of an enriching and interdisciplinary dialogue between Prof. Ramesh Jain, Prof. Yoko Yamakata, Dr. Maija Kale, Prof. Partha Pratim Das, and Prof. Stavroula Mougiakakou on 'Multimodal Food Computing: Bridging Cultural Heritage, AI, and Sustainable Food Futures'.
ACM Workshop Website: MMFood'25 @ ACM Multimedia 2025MMFood'25 Workshop Proceedings
Important Dates (Completed)
- New paper submission deadline: 18th July, 2025
- Notification of acceptance: 5th August, 2025
- Camera-ready paper submission deadline: 20th August, 2025
- Workshop date: (During ACM MM 2025) 28th October, 2025
Download Call For Papers
Contact: mmfood.contact@gmail.com
The organizing team comprised of:
- Patron: Dr. Ramesh Jain (Institute for Future Health, UC Irvine, USA)
- General Chairs: Dr. Stavroula-Georgia Mougiakakou (University of Bern, Switzerland), Dr. Shuqiang Jiang (University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China), Dr. Partha Pratim Das (Ashoka University, India)
- Program Committee Chairs: Dr. Weiqing Min (University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China), Dr. Marianna Obrist (University College London, UK), Dr. Lipika Dey (Ashoka University, India)
- Publicity Chairs: Dr. Yoko Yamakata (University of Tokyo, Japan), Dr. Maija Kāle (Baltic International Centre for Economic Policy Studies, Latvia)
- Publication Chairs: Dr. Ioannis Papathanail (University of Bern, Switzerland), Saransh Kumar Gupta (Ashoka University, India)
RASOI Data Challenge @ NCVPRIPG’25
The RASOI (Recognition and Segmentation of Indian Thali using AI) Data Challenge was a national-level competition organized by the Food Computing Lab in collaboration with the 10th National Conference on Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Image Processing, and Graphics (NCVPRIPG 2025). It was held from 16th to 18th July 2025 at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Srinagar, jointly organized with IIT Jammu and NIT Jalandhar.
This challenge aimed to advance AI-driven food analysis by focusing on the visually complex and culturally diverse Indian Thali. Participants developed models to:
- Detect individual food items within a Thali image using bounding boxes.
- Classify each detected item into its respective food category.
- Estimate the total calorie content of the Thali.
A total of 14 teams participated in the challenge. Congratulations to the winning team: Cyber Hats comprising of Vimal Raj Nagarajan, Uma Maheswar P, and Sowmiya M from the Velammal College of Engineering and Technology, Madurai!
Data Challenge Website: RASOI @ NCVPRIPG 2025Kaggle Link: RASOI Dataset
Important Dates (Completed)
- Registration Deadline: 1st May, 2025
- Dataset Release: 2nd May, 2025
- Submission Deadline: 15th June, 2025
- Evaluation & Results: 25th June, 2025
- Conference Registration: 1st July, 2025
- Final Presentation: (During NCVPRIPG 2025) 16th–18th, July 2025
The organizing team comprised of: Prof. Partha Pratim Das, Prof. Lipika Dey, Prof. Geeta Trilok Kumar, Dr. Mayank Garg, Dr. Soumen Paul, Dr. Yamini Gusain, Saransh Kumar Gupta, Jaee Ponde, and Karan Kumar
Supported by: Koita Centre for Digital Health at Ashoka University (KCDH-A), Mphasis AI & Applied Tech Lab at Ashoka, Centre for Data Science and Analytics (CDSA)