Food Sharing Initiatives (FSIs) are a vital but often hidden part of urban life. The EU CULTIVATE project has developed the SHARECITY 200 database and an interactive graphical exploration application to make these practices visible across 200 cities. In this demonstration, we present the CULTIVATE system, which automates the discovery, classification, and updating of FSIs from online sources, but our interactive tool enables audiences to engage directly with the results through an interactive geo-spatial map. Our demonstration combines multilingual query construction with LLM-based rewriting, web searching, automated FSI classification with final expert verification, scheduled re-crawls to sustain accuracy and user navigation of the database through our graphical Food Sharing Map. The methods used in this system can easily be adapted for the exploration of online information in other domains.

Conversational search system seek to support users in their search activities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of search while reducing their cognitive load. The challenges of multimedia search mean that search supports provided by conversational search have the potential to improve the user search experience. For example, by assisting users in constructing better queries and making more informed decisions in relevance feedback stages whilst searching. However, previous research on conversational search has been focused almost exclusively on text archives. This demonstration illustrates the potential for the application of conversational methods in multimedia search. We describe a framework to enable multimodal conversational search for use with multimedia archives. Our current prototype demonstrates the use of an conversational AI assistant during the multimedia information retrieval process for both image and video collections.