“In a paper first posted on the biorxiv.org preprint server in July, they described using machine learning to tackle a long-standing challenge in olfactory science.”
Image Credit: Kristina Armitage, Quanta Magazine
Lex Wiltschko, an olfactory neuroscientist, used machine learning to better understand the sense of smell. In a paper, Wiltschko and his colleagues from Google Research Brain Team described using machine learning to improve their ability to compute the smell of a molecule from its structure. Wiltschko’s hypothesis was simple: Perhaps chemicals that smell similar are not just chemically related, but biologically related as well. Their findings revealed a hidden order in how our perceptions of smells correspond to the chemistry of the living world.