DARPA Has $3.2M to Sniff You Out

quackking writes "The Army wants to sniff you out. This fedbizopps.gov link to a DARPA pre-RFRQ tells more. 'The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Advanced Technology Office (ATO), as part of the Odortype Detection Program, invites proposals to (1) determine whether genetically-determined odortypes can be used to identify specific individuals, and if so (2) to develop the science and enabling technology for detecting and identifying specific individuals by such odortypes. Total program funding for this effort will not exceed $3.2 million in FY 2003. Multiple awards are anticipated. Proposals are due by January 29, 2003.'"

Comments

Its not hightech

[Anonymous Coward]

And its called a dog

Sounds like a waste of 3.2m

[403Forbidden]

Developing the equipment to identify unique scents would be costly, bulky, and probably easily confused by purfumes and other forms of distraction.

I say that nature does the best job, use some sort of animal to sniff a trail, or use a better means to identify a person.

As it is, fingerprints, eye scans, and DNA are much better than smell, and how would you store the signature of a scent in a database?

"subject has a old-man on crack smell about him."

Re:Sounds like a waste of 3.2m

[Frymaster]

As it is, fingerprints, eye scans, and DNA are much better than smell

not really. all the abovementioned methods require the participation of the identified person (well, you can lift someone's fingerprints from that wine glass... but to compare them you need to have good ink sheet ones).

odour can be detected surreptitiously... say when passing through an airplane security gate, and the person can be identified without being aware of it. if someone scans your retina, you'll notice. if they pick up your smell with a hidden sniffer you won't.

very insidious idea.

Re:Sounds like a waste of 3.2m

[Quixote]

not really. all the above mentioned methods require the participation of the identified person Not for eye (iris) scans. Here's an anecdote. 17 years ago, National Geographic published an eye-catching (no pun intended) picture of an Aghan girl in a Pakistani refugee camp. This year, after the fall of the Taliban, the original photographer (Steve McCurry) went back to that region to try and locate her. Well, to make a long story short, he found her; but the verification was done using iris scanning technology (story here). Interestingly, the company (Iridian) scanned the negative of the original, 17-year-old photo and used that to do the iris matching with the current photo of the girl (woman now). But the point is: the iris was captured from a 17-year-old photo.

Re:Sounds like a waste of 3.2m

[Monkelectric]

Dogs do this all the time -- but HOW they do it is beyond me.

There is a reason for this actually ... if I remember my freshman bio class, in the human brain the nose is "connected" to a center that controls emotion. This is why we are unable to apply any cognitive function to what we smell. Think about the other senses, we have developed complex language to describe them (blue, shiny, transluscent, iridescent... sharp, soft, prickly, sticky, coarse etc, there are also formalized words to describe sounds but I wont go into detail), but with smell there are really only a few words people used to describe a smell, "good" and "bad" most of the time.

Dogs have alot more of their brain dedicated to their olfactory sensors (and I believe more sensors as well?). I wouldn't be surprised if dogs have abilities we don't like being able to recall a smell like we could recall sounds or images. I always thought it was weird that I could remember every note of "The great gig in the sky" and recall it at will as if I was listening to it, but ... I cant even remember what my last g/fs perfume smelled like unless I smell it.

Maybe someone who knows more can give us more information

I propose..

[dj28]

That they use RMS as a test subject. Given his potent odor, their prototype equipment will have an easier time functioning.

Hold on!

[jaymzter]

Ok, you have my name, social security number, IP address, you want to decide how I use MY computer, you take pictures of me when I go to sporting events, you want to cache my surfing habits, sniff my e-mail, and NOW you want to know what my ass smells like??

Two Letters: FO!

Oh, and by the way, All your funk belong to us!

STASI

[micaiah]

This kind of reminds me of the East German's intelligence program of keeping people's scents on file. Maybe that will be next?

It's a PLOT

[K8Fan]

This is just another sneaky government plot, this one to get geeks to bathe!

Re:It's a PLOT

[SuperDuG]

This is just another sneaky government plot, this one to get geeks to bathe!

You're wrong, and here's why: This is not a plot to get geeks to bathe it's a plot to encouorage geeks NOT to bathe.

Take into example, the government knows it can spot a geek rather easily on the streets (reference thinkgeek/linux/sci-fi attire, no real hairstyle, and complete lack of self-control), however an average bum holds these same qualities. If you were able to have one deciding factor to divide the geeks from the bums it would be the shower factor. So geeks, protect yourselves, damn the man, and DO NOT SHOWER.

Uh oh.

[MisterFancypants]

Could the robotic hounds be far behind? Run, Montag, run!

East Germany

[hrieke]

The Statiz (sp? E. German Secret Police) did something like this once. They would take samples of everything and place it in sealed jars so if they needed to track you with the hounds later, they could in theory open the jar with a sample of your sofa in it and let the dogs loose.

Funny thing was that it didn't work.

Re:Intresting stuff

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I think the science behind this smells pretty fishy, and the whole idea stinks!

Smells like an assassination device

[Subcarrier]

A targeted anti-personnel mine comes to mind. Could be useful for taking out enemy commanders. A retreating force could leave these scattered in the bushes. Of course, they'd have to acquire some samples beforehand. Who does Saddam's laundry, by the way?

Re:Smells like an assassination device

[Cruciform]

You could base it off the local food supply...
If soldiers were under orders to consume only MRE packs while in a Middle Easter location, then mines could be programmed to detect strong odors like curry, or other oft-used spices from the region.

It could be used in reverse as well...
You feed all your soldiers rations with heavy amounts of garlic. Everyone stinks but they can safely run though a minefield of combined motion/odor detectors. The pursuing enemy attempts to follow them in and is blown apart because their lack of key odor doesn't disable the mines.

Re:Smells like an assassination device

[Teach]

A targeted anti-personnel mine comes to mind. Could be useful for taking out enemy commanders.

Yet another example of something cyberpunk author William Gibson envisioned many years ago. Quoting the first four paragraphs of his second novel, Count Zero, published in 1986:

They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Dehli, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up to him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco façade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.

Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. The Dutch surgeon like to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International in that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.

It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides. They bought eyes and genitals on the open market. The eyes were green.

About ten years ago, I had a band that was called Slamhound for a little while, until we found out that the name was already taken by an L.A. glam-rock band. Ouch!

Why

[Z0mb1eman]

My guess would be that this would be useful because scent, unlike appearance, is harder to alter. A wanted criminal can just put on some different clothes, maybe grow a beard, etc, and he won't be easily recognized - wear shades, a hat, and he won't be very easy to recognize with any sort of automated system. Other methods of identification - fingerprints or retinal scan - are difficult to apply without the target noticing (and cooperating). I could see machines at airports or bus terminals that "sniff out" anyone who passes by, and if the smell matches with any in its database, bingo... IF the technology works, it could be far more reliable than current methods.

Of course, all this hinges on the idea that slapping on some cheap cologne won't confuse the machine. And I won't go into the privacy/1984/control etc. arguments...

Re:Why

[Reziac]

Actually, what you eat/drink/smoke alters your body chemistry, thus the waste products exuded by your skin. Which in turn alters your scent. Hell, even my human nose can pick up that much. And dogs can readily pick out people who eat certain foods (such as Mexican food).

Tho if this becomes practical, I foresee a thriving market in whole-body deodorant washes. It won't fool a really good dog (probably because they're sensitive to a whole spectrum of scents) but I'd bet it would fool a sensor-and-database arrangement, which perforce would be more limited in its sensory range.

BTW, German Shepherd Dogs have poor noses compared to Labrador Retrievers, and Labs train up easier for this sort of work.

Re:Why

[Reziac]

Actually, not all dogs have a nose superior to a human. Some toy breeds have a nose that is demonstrably inferior to an average human nose!! In my observation (as a professional dog trainer) Boxers and Danes are about on a par with most pet breeds in the nose dept., but seriously sub-average compared to hunting breeds that have been selected for scenting ability.

A fairly consistent clue to how good a dog's nose is, is to watch how long it takes the dog to identify a scent. The better the nose, the faster it happens -- the best noses ID a scent in passing and don't even slow down to do it. A dog that sniffs and sniffs before finally deciding what it's smelling, is a dog that has a poor enough nose that it can't quite make out the scent. Kinda like a nearsighted human trying to read a sign that's just a little too far away. :)

Re:Intresting stuff

[Seehund]

No, unless you actually altered or destroyed the detected "scent" molecules, then "masking" your scent with perfume or whatever wouldn't work. That works on organisms with olfactory organs, who can identify a scent as e.g. "banana", but can't tell the difference between minute structural differences between different banana-smelling molecules, if all "banana" molecules bind to the same receptors.

OTOH I wonder just how useful this would be for identifying individuals with any great certainty. Unlike fingerprints, the genetic sequences of MHCs (major histocompatibility complexes) of two individuals can very well be partially or fully identical (organ transplants wouldn't work otherwise). This is more comparable to identifying -- or grouping -- people by blood typing, and its application would likely not be for e.g. forensic investigations needing certainties approaching 100%. I'm sure it still can have its uses though.

For us damn foreigners, what's a "pre-RFRQ"?

Aromatic Compounds

[VoidEngineer]

So, odors are generally caused by 'aromatic molecules'. The nose, actually, is a molecular shape sensing device. Knowing what a terrorist smells like is central to knowing what kind of compounds and chemicals they've been working with. Somebody who smells acidic, dusty, and metallic is doing very different kind of work than somebody who smells of of wood/bark, musty, or moldy. The first person may be working with metals and acid etching things, whereas the second person may be a mycologist, and growing fungus. Between the two, the former is more likely to be making a bomb; the later bioweapons.

Re:Intresting stuff

[Seehund]

(For those who don't RTFA, it is theorised that the genes coding for our MHCs also determine what detectable scent molecules we spread around us.)

Febreze sales skyrocket.

[Hubert_Shrump]

Loud noise immediately following is DARPAs collective forehead-slap.

Doesn't even have to be voluntary... maybe

[The Tyro]

IANAL, etc, etc... not legal advice, blah, blah, blah

Courts have long held that using odors is not necessarily a violation of your fourth amendment right to be free of unreaonable search and seizure (with a few exceptions).

The air around your vehicle, luggage, or other "object" is free to sniff, so drug sniffing dogs and explosive jiffy-sniffers are usable without a warrant. Vehicle "stop and sniff" random checkpoints have run into some trouble, but if you've been stopped by a police officer for some reason (traffic offense), and he suspects the presence of drugs, he can call for a dog, no problem. If said K-9 alerts on your car, probable cause to search is established. I believe the case was United States v. Place in the early 1980s.

Air around your person has been treated a bit differently, since random, agressive sniffing by a dog, without some articulable suspicion, has been considered a "search" by some courts.

There was a case of high school students being personally sniffed, and found unconstitutional... it was B.C. versus Plumas Unified School District. Here's a link with some info: Newspaper article you can probably google for the whole text of the decision.

Based on some of the above cases, this might actually BE unconstitutional, since it's a direct sniff of a person, not an object. You can sniff people without individualized suspicion, but the state has to seriously justify it... minimal privacy invasion, and compelling state interest. However, with the current terrorism problem, and simply having to walk through a gate of some kind to be sniffed (minimal invasion of privacy), this might pass constitutional muster. The lawyers will have their work cut out for them with this one.