'Neuromorphic' computing chip could 'smell' explosives, narcotics, and diseases

An emerging form of AI known as neuromorphic computing has been used to recognize scents emitted by explosives, chemical weapons, and narcotics. Researchers from Intel and Cornell University made the breakthrough by equipping Intel's neuromorphic test chip Loihi with neural algorithms that mimic what happens in your brain when you smell something. This enabled the system to recognize the smell of each hazardous chemical from just a single sample. The study could pave the way to a vast range of applications of neuromorphic computing, which mimics the brain's basic mechanics to make machine learning more efficient. Intel believes the "electronic nose systems" could be used by airport security to detect weapons and explosives, by police and border control to find narcotics, by robots to monitor gases pimped out into the atmosphere, and by the makers of smoke detectors to improve their products.