July 4, 2014

IBM Research Breakthrough Helps Public Health Officials Improve Food Safety


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Novel learning system combines petabytes of retail data with public health case reports to identify contaminated food sources, shorten intervention times and limit the spread of disease outbreaks

IBM) today announced a first-of-a-kind system that is designed to help food retailers, distributors and public health officials predict the most likely contaminated food sources and accelerate the investigation of food-borne disease outbreaks. Using novel algorithms, visualization, and statistical techniques, the tool can use information on the date and location of billions of supermarket food items sold each week to quickly identify with high probability a set of potentially “guilty” products with in as few as 10 outbreak case reports.