He pointed out that sciences based on the measurements of sound and light already existed. But there was no science of odor.Today, smartphones in most people’s pockets provide impressive built-in capabilities based on the sciences of sound and light: voice assistants, facial recognition and photo enhancement.
But to be useful to people, machine olfaction needs to go a step further. The system needs to know what a certain molecule or a set of molecules smells like to a human. For that, machine olfaction needs machine learning.Machine learning is also key to digitizing smells because it can learn to map the molecular structure of an odor-causing compound to textual odor descriptors.
But machine olfaction has long faced a data shortage problem, partly because most people cannot verbally describe smells as effortlessly and recognizably as they can describe sights and sounds.