“Smell can be art, and it also can be science”: AI/ML and digital olfaction

We perceive the world through our senses, watching the sunset, hearing the staccato of a violin soloist, smelling and ultimately tasting the chocolate and butter of freshly-baked cookies, and of course, feeling the touch of a loving partner. Yet while scientists have answered fundamental questions about color and audio, from understanding their physics to constructing mathematical representations of them, there remains a huge gap when it comes to smell.

Given how much more complex and higher dimensional it is, smell is an extraordinarily hard sense to capture, a problem which sits at the open frontiers of neuroscience and information theory. Now after many decades of discovery, the tooling and understanding has finally developed to begin to map, analyze and ultimately transmit smell.

Joining “Securities” host Danny Crichton is Alex Wiltschko, CEO and founder of Osmo, a Lux-backed company organized to give computers a sense of smell. He’s dedicated his life (from collecting and smelling bottles of perfume in grade school to his neuroscience PhD) to understanding this critical human sense and progressing the future of the field.

In this episode, we talk about smell and memory, the history of sense science, the mathematical challenges of modeling scent, the human physiology of smell and our surprising performance against even the best scientific lab equipment, the importance of chemical sensing, creating the digital olfaction group at Google Brain, how the mixture modeling problem remains the last and key frontier of this science, and finally, why the declining power of insect repellant is an important climate change challenge that the new science of smell can potentially solve.