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Of all the senses, scent is a particularly difficult one to teach AI, but that doesn't stop researchers from trying. Most recently, researchers from Intel and Cornell University trained a neuromorphic chip to learn and recognize the scents of 10 hazardous chemicals. In the future, the tech might enable "electronic noses" and robots to detect weapons, explosives, narcotics and even diseases. 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.

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.

While the world is gearing up to fight the pandemic in the form of coronavirus, Intel has made a significant breakthrough. Intel has designed a chip that can smell various chemicals present in the air. Based on Intel's Loihi platform, the chip unsurprisingly uses machine learning algorithms to smell scents in the air. And that includes hazardous chemicals as well. The neuromorphic chip is "based on the architecture of the mammalian olfactory bulb".