‘Giving computers a sense of smell’: the quest to scientifically map odours

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By digitising scents as we have images and sounds, researchers hope they can transform everything from food and agriculture to disease prevention

He then quizzed the probably confused class of 1914 as to whether they could tell when one scent was twice the strength of another, or measure the difference between two distinct odours. Eventually, though, he came to the point: “Until you can measure their likenesses and difference, you can have no science of odour,” Bell said. “If you are ambitious to find a new science, measure a smell.”

There are good reasons to want to replicate that process with machines. Some VOCs – such as contaminants in food or carcinogens such as benzene – can be harmful and worth detecting before they reach our noses; others might point to dangers such as gas leaks or concealed explosives; and some can indicate other problems. If someone’s breath smells like freshly mown clover it

“You can’t design anything of meaningful complexity without a specification,” adds Wiltschko. “You can’t build a digital camera without the red, green, blue colour model . You can’t build a microphone without a low to high frequency space. And so the map has to come before the engineering.” “Whatever map we were going to find was not going to fit on a flat piece of paper. Therefore, the map-making tools we’ve used as scientists in the past were not going to help us. We needed to wait for software, for artificial intelligence, for statistical analysis of patterns in large datasets.”

 

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