AI, Brains and Smell

A favorite topic because we were very involved in how to sell in context influenced smell (and aroma) neural interaction that led to purchase.   Here some new understanding, not directly useful yet, but there are some aspects of the brain we may need to understand to mimic smell context and influence.  We had several vendors pitch us in this space, in our retail labs,   without useful results.

 Artificial Intelligence has a Strange new Muse: Our Sense of Smell

Today’s artificial intelligence systems, including the artificial neural networks broadly inspired by the neurons and connections of the nervous system, perform wonderfully at tasks with known constraints. They also tend to require a lot of computational power and vast quantities of training data. That all serves to make them great at playing chess or Go, at detecting if there’s a car in an image, at differentiating between depictions of cats and dogs. “But they are rather pathetic at composing music or writing short stories,” said Konrad Kording, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They have great trouble reasoning meaningfully in the world.”

from Quanta Magazine via Wired .... 

To overcome those limitations, some research groups are turning back to the brain for fresh ideas. But a handful of them are choosing what may at first seem like an unlikely starting point: the sense of smell, or olfaction. Scientists trying to gain a better understanding of how organisms process chemical information have uncovered coding strategies that seem especially relevant to problems in AI. Moreover, olfactory circuits bear striking similarities to more complex brain regions that have been of interest in the quest to build better machines.

Computer scientists are now beginning to probe those findings in machine learning contexts. ... "