Intel's Neuromorphic Chip Learns To 'Smell' 10 Hazardous Chemicals

Researchers from Intel and Cornell University trained a neuromorphic chip to learn and recognize the scents of 10 hazardous chemicals. Engadget reports: Using Intel's Loihi, a neuromorphic chip, the team designed an algorithm based on the brain's olfactory circuit. When you take a whiff of something, molecules stimulate olfactory cells in your nose. Those cells send signals to the brain's olfactory system, which then fires off electrical pulses. The researchers were able to mimic that circuitry in Loihi's silicon circuits. According to Intel, the chip can identify 10 smells, including acetone, ammonia and methane, even when other strong smells are present. And, Loihi learned each odor with just a single sample. That's especially impressive, the researchers say, because other deep learning techniques can require 3,000 times more training samples to reach the same level of accuracy. The work has been published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

Something neat? From MY Intel??

[BAReFO0t]

Unpossible!
Pink elephants fly. Hell freezes over. People wear shoes on their hands. They eat with their butts. Trump is president. Oh, wait!

Re:

[NateFromMich]

Unpossible! Pink elephants fly. Hell freezes over. People wear shoes on their hands. They eat with their butts. Trump is president. Oh, wait!

Don't worry. They've surely built it on 14nm.

Ya, but ...

[fahrbot-bot]

... can it smell BS? 'Cause that would be really helpful.

Can't wait for this

[cliffjumper222]

I have a smell in a room in my house that I really want to identify, and more accurately find out where it's coming from so I can remove it. I've tried a lot of different approaches - using paper towels taped to spots around the room with aluminum foil on the back. You wait a few days and then remove them and take a big sniff. Ideally, you wear a respirator between sniffs for about 20 minutes so your nose gets completely cleared of ambient smells. This didn't reveal anything. I repainted the whole room, but

Re:

[scalptalc]

It might be ancient cat/dog urine. That's a real toughie with wood floors. Try "Nature's Miracle" line of enzyme products. We got a wonderful cat, a throwaway rescued by Dumb Friends, which was suffering from FIC, and was possibly abused before being surrendered. We learned about her condition when she nailed a leather chair. (Note for the habitually triggered: I don't endorse this product but I do swear by it.) It's cheap enough to mop an entire floor. It might even work with tobacco residue. Distilled whi

Re:

[RespekMyAthorati]

Was the previous owner someone who liked to dress up as a clown?

Don't the raw sensors do most of the work?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I was under the impression that, for animals at least, most of the work was done by the highly-specific receptors in the nose (and tongue- turns out smell sensors are there, too). These are related to the immune system and do the same trick of having an active region that binds to a specific region of some particular sets of molecules, with all the work being done in parallel by the array of positive, negative and "fatty" uncharged amino acids in the protein. (Plus a couple of sensors for overall positive or negative charge, e.g. for ammonia.)

Yes, complex molecules would trigger several receptors in varying amounts: "It has a THIS region and a THAT region and a NOT QUITE BUT CLOSE TO THIS OTHER region, and is a positive ion". So there's some post-processing to sort the array of "out of 0-10: this much from each sensor" into "strong ethyl alcohol, roses, a little aftershave, and somebody should flush the toilet", and that's what this would emulate. But that's only a moderately complex part of the job.

(Not to belittle the work: It is complex and important.)

Sense of smell

[spinitch]

From radioactive dangers (Chernobyl , Fukushima) , to more common industrial hazards advanced particle detection a very curious area. For instance, Allergic suffers would be a target area to help fund. Much capital goes into entertainment/advertising and automation of driving since revenue potential. Sales opportunities help draw in funds. Then there is stuff like WeWork which is just WTF.

Intel to put K9s out of work 10 years after AMD64

[Joe_Dragon]

Intel to put K9s out of work 10 years after AMD64 K9 chips killed the itanium