{"id":17878,"date":"2023-01-24T14:38:53","date_gmt":"2023-01-24T19:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=17878"},"modified":"2023-01-26T10:23:06","modified_gmt":"2023-01-26T15:23:06","slug":"drive-through-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2023\/01\/drive-through-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"Drive-Through Intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Illustration<\/a>\n

When Atif Kureishy MS \u201904 was a kid in the 1980s, enjoying a fast-food lunch was simple. His parents would pull into a single-lane, fast-food drive-through, order, and pay in cash. Within minutes, he\u2019d be tucking into a meal of hot chicken nuggets with barbecue dipping sauce, crispy fries, and an icy soft drink.<\/p>\n

Quick-service restaurants aren\u2019t that simple anymore. The global pandemic, labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, and the popularity of third-party delivery services have challenged the $799-billiona- year restaurant industry. Meanwhile, consumers want more choices about how to order, customize, pay for, and receive their food.<\/p>\n

Kureishy\u2019s solution? Artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe restaurant business is changing and can no longer just throw people at its problems because the labor turnover rates are too high, and the guest experience suffers,\u201d says Kureishy, founder of Vistry<\/a>, a San Diego\u2013based company that uses artificial intelligence and voice ordering to help restaurants improve efficiency, speed, and quality of service. \u201cThere has to be another solution, and that\u2019s the pursuit of automation and using AI-based techniques.\u201d<\/p>\n

Artificial intelligence systems are not one-size-fits-all in the fast-food restaurant industry. For one big chain, Kureishy\u2019s company is using computer vision to collect data and analytics to track the life span of a french fry to maximize crispiness and reduce waste. To improve order accuracy in another restaurant chain\u2014a problem in many restaurants\u2014he\u2019s using deep learning to validate the contents of take-out bags against the original orders before they go to the customer.<\/p>\n

And to make the drive-through experience more efficient, Kureishy has developed a system that collects data to understand how long customers are waiting so restaurants can better serve more people faster. \u201cIf you think of a fluid dynamics problem, that\u2019s exactly what you\u2019re trying to turn the drive-through into,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Kureishy completed his bachelor\u2019s degree in physics at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and worked as a software engineer for Lockheed Martin and other companies while earning a master\u2019s degree in distributed computing through the Whiting School\u2019s Engineering for Professionals<\/a> program. \u201cThe foundational understanding I got from Hopkins got me on the path of being a persistent learner and underpins everything I do today,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

It may be a year or two before your local quick-service restaurant will be using some of the systems Kureishy created to improve their food and customer experience. But be warned: Being asked \u201cDo you want fries with that?\u201d at a fast-food joint may soon be a relic of the past. The voice bot he\u2019s developed to automate order taking may already know the answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Atif Kureishy MS \u201904 was a kid in the 1980s, enjoying a fast-food lunch was simple. His parents would pull into a single-lane, fast-food drive-through, order, and pay in cash. Within minutes, he\u2019d be tucking into a meal of hot chicken nuggets with barbecue dipping sauce, crispy fries, and an icy soft drink. Quick-service…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":18321,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","issue-winter-2023"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDrive-Through Intelligence - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2023\/01\/drive-through-intelligence\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Drive-Through Intelligence - JHU Engineering Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When Atif Kureishy MS \u201904 was a kid in the 1980s, enjoying a fast-food lunch was simple. 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