Related papers: Humans can discriminate trillions of olfactory sti…
A recent paper in a prominent science magazine claims to show that humans can discriminate at least 1 trillion odors. The authors reached that conclusion after performing just 260 comparisons of two smells, of which about half could be…
Olfactory systems use a small number of broadly sensitive receptors to combinatorially encode a vast number of odors. We propose a method of decoding such distributed representations by exploiting a statistical fact: receptors that do not…
Advances in neural sensing technology are making it possible to observe the olfactory process in great detail. In this paper, we conceptualize smell from a Data Science and AI perspective, that relates the properties of odorants to how they…
Environmental factors determine the smells we perceive, but societal factors factors shape the importance, sentiment and biases we give to them. Descriptions of smells in text, or as we call them `smell experiences', offer a window into…
It was observed before that due to convergence in the olfactory system a possible amplification can be as large as the degree of convergence. This is in the case when a single impulse from the converging inputs is enough to trigger the…
While olfaction is central to how animals perceive the world, this rich chemical sensory modality remains largely inaccessible to machines. One key bottleneck is the lack of diverse, multimodal olfactory training data collected in natural…
We analyze the psychophysical responses of human observers to an ensemble of monomolecular odorants. Each odorant is characterized by a set of 146 perceptual descriptors obtained from a database of odor character profiles. Each odorant is…
The sense of smell is an important part of living organisms. It assists with the interaction of the living organism with its environment. The mechanism by which smell is detected and identified is not fully known. Earlier, shape theory was…
Current literature holds that many cognitive functions can be performed outside consciousness. Evidence for this view comes from unconscious priming. In a typical experiment, visual stimuli are masked, such that participants are close to…
People are able to detect up to 1 trillion odors. Yet, city planning is concerned only with a few bad odors, mainly because odors are currently captured only through complaints made by urban dwellers. To capture both good and bad odors, we…
Olfaction, the sense of smell, has received scant attention from a signal processing perspective in comparison to audition and vision. In this paper, we develop a signal processing paradigm for olfactory signals based on new scientific…
Animals smelling in the real world use a small number of receptors to sense a vast number of natural molecular mixtures, and proceed to learn arbitrary associations between odors and valences. Here, we propose a new interpretation of how…
Odor detection underpins food safety, environmental monitoring, medical diagnostics, and many more fields. The current artificial sensors developed for odor detection struggle with complex mixtures while non-invasive recordings lack…
This study reports on the semantic organization of English sensory descriptors of the five basic senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell in a large corpus of over 8,000 fiction books. We introduce a large-scale text data-driven…
Natural odors typically consist of many molecules at different concentrations. It is unclear how the numerous odorant molecules and their possible mixtures are discriminated by relatively few olfactory receptors. Using an…
The olfactory sense measures the chemical composition of the environment using a diverse array of olfactory receptors. In vertebrates, the olfactory receptors reside in a mucus layer in the nasal cavity and can thus only detect odorants…
Understanding how molecular structure gives rise to odor perception remains a long-standing challenge, with ongoing debate over whether olfaction is primarily governed by molecular shape, vibrational properties, or their interplay at the…
Given the structure of a novel molecule, there is still no one who can reliably predict what odor percept that molecule will evoke. The challenge comes from both the difficulty in quantitatively characterizing molecular structure, and the…
Agents' judgment depends on perception and previous knowledge. Assuming that previous knowledge depends on perception, we can say that judgment depends on perception. So, if judgment depends on perception, can agents judge that they have…
We present a technique for estimating the similarity between objects such as movies or foods whose proper representation depends on human perception. Our technique combines a modest number of human similarity assessments to infer a pairwise…