Successful Qatari entrepreneur Khalid Aboujassoum recently joined the CES Food Tech Conference as a guest speaker – an annual trade show organised by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA).

The conference was held on 5 to 8 January at the Venetian Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas, the largest-of-its-kind international event, which typically hosts presentations of products and technologies in the consumer electronics industry.

This edition of the conference examined how the world of food and cooking is being reinvented through innovation and technology. It brought together leaders of food, culinary and technology industries from around the world to share lessons learned and discuss the biggest opportunities and challenges in food tech.

The Kitchen 2030Conference organiser CTA is a standards and trade organisation representing over 2,200 consumer technology companies in the United States. Their flagship conference serves as the ultimate platform for business magnates and pioneering thinkers to connect, collaborate and propel consumer technology forward. Among the key participants are manufacturers, developers, and suppliers of consumer technology hardware, content, technology delivery systems, and more.

Else Labs Inc

Aboujassoum is the founder and CEO of Else Labs Inc, which produces and sells the revolutionary invention Oliver, a smart cooking robot that helps to optimise kitchen automation. He is also the co-founder and current chairman of Ibtechar, Qatar’s first incubated innovation and turnkey solutions startup, which has actually delivered 70% of all innovation spaces in Qatar over the past decade.

Named Qatar’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2011, Aboujassoum was the first Qatari winner of the Stars of Science award in 2012. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering, Engineering Management and Entrepreneurship from the University of Ottawa, Canada.

On Day 2 of the CES Food Tech Conference, Aboujassoum participated as a panellist in a session titled, The Kitchen 2030: How Food and Cooking Will Change in the Future. The discussions focused on the significant transformation that artificial intelligence (AI), smart technologies and robotics are expected to bring to the way people cook, store and even eat food over the next decade.

It is inevitable that robots will cook our food. The questions are when and who is going to make it happen?

He said that their design thesis is that form should follow function and Oliver is a manifestation of that. He does not believe that cooking robots will have dangling hands to perform the tasks. The cooking robots of the future will be familiar and designed with purpose, and Oliver is exactly that. Technology is driving convergence in the process.


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