UK Chip-Maker Arm is Working on an AI-Powered Smart Chip That Can Tell if You Smell (newscientist.com)

UK chip-maker Arm, better known for developing the hardware that powers most smartphones, is working on a new generation of smart chips that embed artificial intelligence inside devices. One of these chips is being taught to smell. From a report: The idea is that the chips will be small and cheap enough to be built into clothing, allowing an AI to keep tabs on your BO throughout the day. Arm also wants to add the chips to food packaging to monitor freshness. The e-noses are part of a project called PlasticArmPit, in which Arm is developing smart chips made from thin sheets of plastic. Each chip will have eight different sensors and a built-in machine learning circuit. It will look like a piece of cling-film with bits stuck to it, says James Myers at Arm. "PlasticArmPit will be the first application of machine learning in plastic electronics."

Smells are made up of different combinations and concentrations of gases. The sensors on the chip will detect different chemicals in the air and the AI will take that complex data and identify it as a particular whiff. The chip will then score the smell. If it is in the armpit of your shirt, it will tell you the strength of your body odour from 1 to 5, says Myers. "It's the job of the machine learning to collect and interpret all the data and then alert the user if action is needed."

Comments

Re:AI

[Oswald McWeany]

How is this "AI"?

The problem is, you use a different definition of AI to most journalists. You probably grew up in the 20th Century and was first exposed to AI as a term by science fiction authors or theorists to describe machine sentience.

At sometime in the 21st century it began to mean nothing more than an algorithm where a computer program makes a decision based on IO. You can complain, or argue that this isn't AI- and historically you would be right; however, this isn't the first time words have changed meaning based on being used "incorrectly" enough times that the "incorrect" meaning became the "correct" meaning (if the majority of people use a word in a certain way, it becomes the new meaning- English is a living language).

It's easy to point to other examples. Prior to the 20th century "Awesome" was pretty much synonymous with the word "Awful". People probably started using the word to mean it's current meaning ironically (like some people said "bad" to mean good in the 80's- or how kids in Britain might say "wicked" to mean "cool") - eventually the ironic meaning became the mainstream meaning.

Use the word decimate and you'll probably get a lot of people tell you that the word means "to remove 1/10th". And prior to about 20 years ago, that's what most people would have suggested it meant- nowadays people assume the opposite, that it means to completely destroy something. It was used "incorrectly" for so long that the incorrect meaning became the correct meaning.

People are always whining about the term "AI" on articles on Slashdot... well, guess what... the fact that you have to complain about it every single day means that you're on the losing side of this one. AI doesn't mean what you think it does anymore. It no longer has anything to do with machine sentience.