Artificial Intelligence Has A Strange New Muse: Our Sense Of Smell - AI Summary

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. State-of-the-art machine learning techniques used today were built at least in part to mimic the structure of the visual system, which is based on the hierarchical extraction of information. Deep neural networks were built to work in a similarly hierarchical way, leading to a revolution in machine learning and AI research. As a car navigates a new environment in real time -- an environment that's constantly changing, that's full of noise and ambiguity -- deep learning techniques inspired by the visual system might fall short. Saket Navlakha, a computer scientist at the Salk Institute, has developed algorithms based on the fly olfactory circuit, in hopes of improving machine learning techniques for similarity searches and novelty detection tasks.