A workshop to explore the potential applications of Artificial Intelligence in predicting and preventing feed and food contamination incidents was hosted by the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University, Belfast. The event was very well attended by members of the Food Fortress who were keen to understand the potential for this innovative approach  to help manage the contamination risks in the animal feed sector.

Manos Karvounis, head of research at the AI company Agroknow gave an excellent presentation of how AI can help forecast future events and showed how data can be used to make accurate predictions. Some of his presentation was based on mycotoxin monitoring results from the Food Fortress program and he showed how this excellent data set can be exploited to better inform the testing priorities for mycotoxins going forward. 

Following a very good discussion it was agreed that the Food Fortress would explore future opportunities to work more closely with Agroknow to further enhance the effectiveness of the scheme in protecting the integrity of the Northern Ireland food chain. 

Food Fortress director, Robin Irvine commented, “Food Fortress leads the world in feed quality assurance and with over 10 year of testing data on file we have a valuable resource which can be used to good effect. AI is one of the tools which can be used to unlock the power of this information to inform future risk management programs”.