The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has launched the second phase of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Imported Seafood Pilot program. The pilot is scheduled to run from February 1, 2021 through July 31, 2021, and the agency does not expect any significant service interruptions to industry and seafood import processers.
The pilot is designed to enhance and improve the agency’s ability to quickly and efficiently identify imported seafood products that may pose a threat to public health. This is especially important since the United States imports upwards of 94 percent of its seafood supply.
In 2019, the agency launched the first phase of the pilot, an analytical proof of concept, to examine the use of Machine Learning (ML) to target violative seafood shipments. The analysis demonstrated the potential for AI to assist FDA in ensuring the security and safety of the nation’s food supply, specifically imported seafood. Machine learning is a type of AI that makes it possible to rapidly analyze data, automatically identifying connections and patterns in data that people or even the agency’s current rules-based screening system cannot see.
