Computers That Can Smell

Andreas Keller has been building the largest collection of odor perceptions of its kind in which dozens of volunteers, each having made 10 visits to the lab, described 476 different smells using 19 descriptive words (including sweet, urinous, sweaty, and warm), along with the pleasantness and intensity of the scent. Before Keller's database, the go-to catalog at researchers' disposal was a list of 10 odor compounds, described by 150 participants using 146 words, which had been developed by pioneering olfaction scientist Andrew Dravnieks more than three decades earlier. Here, Grens describes how Keller launched a competition that requires modelers to algorithms for estimating how people will perceive a particular odor from its molecular characteristics.