The Food-Bot Android app is finally here. The app allows you to add reminders of upcoming free food events, and receive notifications if a new free food event has been found.

I'll be traveling to Pittsburgh to talk about the theory behind Food-Bot.
If you're interested in machine learning, natural language processing, or food, come on out!

Papa Johns pizza served.

I decided the website becomes a whole lot more usable (and less sketchy) when users can actually see where the events came from that Food-Bot found.

Emailing subscribers is somewhat of a complicated problem. On the one hand, I want subscribers to find out about all the latest free food events.

I've been trying to make the site increasingly automated, and as a result, I've been looking for ways to use Food-Bot more and more to take care of tasks that don't necessarily need a human. In the process of doing this, I decided to add a feature where Food-Bot offers suggestions based on what it knows. Food-Bot will now try to help users realize if they have made a mistake in the event they added, and allow them to make changes.

Previously, every event that was found by Food-Bot needed to be approved by me as indeed being a free food event before it was made visible on the site. One of the problems with this is that there was always a latency between when the event was first discovered by Food-Bot and when I found out about it and was able to approve it.

This Wednesday I'll be making a virtual appearance at Carnegie Mellon from where I live (the internet, not California). If you're hungry to learn how Food-Bot works, or just plain hungry, come to the Food-Bot Tech Talk!

Wednesday, 20 April 2011
Reddy Conference Room - Gates&Hillman 4405
6:00 pm
--pizza will be provided

So you want to advertise your free food event, but don't want to go through the hassle of filling out the "Add Event" form? I just released the "Quick Add" feature, and now adding events has never been easier! Just paste a description of your event in the Quick Add form (top of right banner on calendar page) and Food-Bot will instantly process your text, extract the information, and post it on the calendar for you! It will even decide how awkward your event will be for you!

Tired of having to post each occurrence of your weekly student group meeting? I have just added support for recurring events. After creating the first instance, open the event and click the "Repeat" tab to specify the repeat interval and "repeat until when" date.