At Entertainment Computing 2025 (EC2025) held at Nihon University from August 25 to August 27, 2025, “Sweet Synthesizer: Taste media personalizing sweetness” presented by ANCHI Haruka and SENDA Chika (3rd- and 4th- year students, respectively, in the Department of Frontier Media Science, School of Interdisciplinary Mathematical Sciences), and Professor MIYASHITA Homei, won the Interactive Presentation Award.
This award is given to an outstanding research presentation in the demonstration or poster presentations based on participants’ voting.
This research aims to achieve sweetness tailored to individual preferences by combining eight types of zero-calorie sweeteners. Each sweetener possesses distinct tastes and characteristics, including some with bitterness, and blending them enables the expression of diverse sweetness profiles. The sweeteners and their ratios are determined through dialogue with a large language model (LLM). For example, inputting instructions like “Make it sweeter” or “Reduce the bitterness” prompts the system to propose a customized blend. Dedicated hardware then dispenses the sweetener solution accordingly. Furthermore, since all sweeteners used are sugar-free, even calorie-conscious individuals can enjoy diverse sweet experiences.
During the demo presentation, participants sampled three types of tea: (1) unsweetened black tea, (2) black tea with randomly mixed sweeteners, and (3) black tea made with a blend proposed by the system. As a result, many participants commented that they “clearly felt the difference in taste owing to the blend’s balance.”
