Give him your last few meals and he can virtually map your taste buds. Escoffier would be addled by the very notions, but this 27-year-old, spiky-haired computer whiz at the MIT Media Lab here in Cambridge is starting to shake up the food world with a combination of artificial intelligence and natural obsession.

Can't figure out what to have for dinner? Synesthetic Recipes, a searchable computer database of 60,000 recipes, can't actually read your mind, but it comes close.

There is a science behind the marathon of personal revelation, explained Hugo Liu, Hunch's chief scientist. ... Liu believes that computers can begin to model certain human behaviors if they are given enough data.

A recent study by Hugo Liu, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, used analysis of 150,000 blog entries to create GenderLens, a news filtering system that created "men's" and "women's" news feeds. "In broadest strokes, we drew the conclusion that females express more vividly, are detail and event driven, while male expression gravitates toward the hierarchical, abstract, and utilitarian."

Imagine picking up a novel at a bookstore, and instantly your cell phone receives a text message containing your friends' opinions of the book, as well as suggestions for films you might enjoy. Media Lab doctoral candidate Hugo Liu is creating just such a system, called Ambient Semantics: a sensor embedded in a ring or wristwatch will read a radio frequency identification tag affixed to an object.

And then there's the work of Hugo Liu. His stuff is really, really out there. ... He can program an academic's body of writing in such a way that a computer can read and organize attitudes.

Programming languages, he says, are "rigid and unaccommodating to people's natural input." Liu, who is interested in cognitive linguistics, wondered whether he could make programming more intuitive by having a computer derive code directly from natural language.