Asst. Prof. Tome Eftimov gave an invited talk at the INFOTECH-DATA Kick-Off Meeting, held on 19–20 May 2026 at IATA-CSIC in Valencia.

The talk, titled “From Data Silos to Interoperable Food Knowledge Systems: Lessons from the Past · AI Challenges Shaping Our Future,” presented recent advances in AI-driven food data management, including food information extraction, semantic resources, domain-specialized language models, grounded food and nutrition question answering, and ontology-agnostic retrieval pipelines.

The presentation highlighted ongoing work on CAFETERIA, FoodyLLM, FoodBench-QA 2026, and BioFoodRAG/OntoRAG, showing how structured knowledge, transparent benchmarks, and domain-aware AI methods can support the transition from fragmented food data silos to interoperable food knowledge systems.

The event brought together INFOTECH-DATA working group members and invited speakers to discuss future directions for food data, techno-functionality, and AI-enabled knowledge infrastructures.