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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."
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."
On the BO railroad it goes off all the time!
Apple are already working on a new deodorant called iStink.
It says it gives you an odor score on a scale of 1 to 5. You cannot do that with standard programming, it requires AI to categorize various concentration levels into various stink levels.
One for each of my IT students.
How is this "AI"? What "complex data"? The sensors are simple. The program would look like if (concentration_of_gas1 > threshold_a && concentration_of_gas2 > threshold_b) {you_stink=true;}
But ... but .. different chemicals! Different!
We can't handle that without AI?!?!?
... is the Monty Python foot icon?
if (concentration_of_gas1 > threshold_a && concentration_of_gas2 > threshold_b) {your_stink_level=1;}
else if (concentration_of_gas1 > threshold_c && concentration_of_gas2 > threshold_d) {your_stink_level=2;}
else if (you_read_slashdot) {stink_level=5;}
I wasn't aware that Japan was part of China now.
Should be a big hit with IBM management.
Stink level 5! Achievement unlocked!
Congratulations. In your racist rant you failed to even name the right country. To fact check you... the company headquarters are still in the UK, the CEO is British (but living in California) and the company owning it is actually Japanese. I doubt Japan would be pleased being confused with China.
I ran my program on myself and I got a stink level of 100. Clearly there is a bug somewhere.
Sorcery!
body odor contains natural pheromones
Fresh body odors do. Not the ones that bacteria have had a day or two to work on since the last shower.
Have gnu, will travel.
maybe yours is set on binary?
Whoosh
That was it! Pair programming works.
Cancer can and has been detected through odors by dogs.
Seems like that would be a much better use of this technology than would be just telling you if you stink.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
... of a nose.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The majority ownership was just sold to China from Japan. ARM has been owned by Asia for several years now...
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.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It also tells you if you put too much perfume/cologne on to mask your BO. Sometimes a little BO is easier to handle than overpowering all-consuming floral scents.
My god man, use a switch!
... but I think UnderArm might at least tie in terms of name recognition... ;-)
Check your premises.
How is this "AI"? What "complex data"? The sensors are simple. The program would look like if (concentration_of_gas1 > threshold_a && concentration_of_gas2 > threshold_b) {you_stink=true;}
The A.I. part comes into play when it gives you the notification. It will learn your personality, and determine if telling you "Dude, you stink!" is going to hurt your feelings, thereby switching to "It may be beneficial for you to apply some deodorant in the near future, but only if you want to."
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
But it's so hard to program with wireless controllers.
awesome (adj.)
1590s, "profoundly reverential," from awe (n.) + -some (1). Meaning "inspiring awe or dread" is from 1670s; weakened colloquial sense of "impressive, very good" is recorded by 1961 and was in vogue from after c. 1980. Related: Awesomely; awesomeness.
Yea, I know, I know. If I take a lot of Bean-o or equivalent (alpha-glactosidase from aspergillus niger) over a period of a couple weeks, it can adversely affect my aroma. I think that stuff messes with my gut flora. It becomes pretty obvious & embarrassing at the gym when everyone else in the core fitness class sets up in the opposite corner of the room.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Yeah, I got it wrong - they're Japanese now.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
And to fact check you... Softbank sold 51% of ARM to China - it's a Chinese company with a Japanese minority owner.
Why the focus on the armpit? We can all turn our head and sniff. Most of us can't check our other scent glands as easily.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Yes, let's complicate clothing by adding a breakable, pointless piece of technology that can't POSSIBLY be misused for marketing-driven purposes.
Who actually wants this - people with body-odor issues? Do they not already know they have body-odor issues? And the article says "If it is in the armpit of your shirt, it will tell you the strength of your body odour from 1 to 5"... and? Are offices going to be modified to include closets, so we all can keep changes of clothing at work?
A few commenters have mentioned speculative health applications - but the article makes it obvious the main thrust is driven by some weird weird plan to "see if we can create a new market by making people more self-conscious".
#DeleteChrome
perfume sometimes uses urine as an ingredient so whether that is a good or bad smell very much depends on what other gases are present.
It really doesn't. People are just very good at convincing themselves that if they paid a lot of money for something it must not reek.
[drum roll] TERRIBLE !
Notice that TFS headline includes:
"Smart Chip That Can Tell if You Smell"
That clearly says to me that it can tell if your nose is working correctly. But I think it was meant to say that this chip can tell if you have an odor; a very different thing. Yes, I know, English is difficult to parse for some editors.
...omphaloskepsis often...
From wikipedia: "Unlike most traditional microprocessor suppliers, such as Intel, Freescale (the former semiconductor division of Motorola, now NXP Semiconductors) and Renesas (a former joint venture between Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric), Arm only creates and licenses its technology as intellectual property (IP),[70] rather than manufacturing and selling its own physical CPUs, GPUs, SoCs or microcontrollers."
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Fire the HR people who whine, hire non-US-born workers to replace them. People with HR degrees are like Kleenex -- easily thrown away and replaced.
And to fact check you with your own facts, ARM Holdings sold a majority stake in its subsidiary known as Arm Technology (China) Co., Ltd
Softbank still owns ARM Holdings
decimate used to mean executing one in ten soldiers as a punishment for desertion.
Yes we need leading edge technology for computer to do Math.
It reminds me 20 years ago while working in a College Computer Lab.
A student asked me if I had a calculator.
Thinking that he wanted a TI-96 Graphing calculator (because many of the math classes were centered around that calculator) I had to tell me I didn't have one.
He was a bit perplex and a bit desperate, because it will take him a lot longer to work out his assignment.
I asked him what he needed a calculator for.
"You know, Adding, Subtracting, Multiplying and diving"
I then asked why didn't he use the calculator app on the PC.
He didn't know about that.
So I showed him the app. which blew his mind.
Also on a side note, he was working an assignment on an Application Called Maple. Which is a rather advance Math application where it could just as easily handle the simple math problems by typing the formula into the command line and hitting enter.
So I showed him that too, but that just pushed him over the edge.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
How is this "AI"? What "complex data"? The sensors are simple. The program would look like if (concentration_of_gas1 > threshold_a && concentration_of_gas2 > threshold_b) {you_stink=true;}
I think you've answered your own question. The program won't look like that, because the cost and effort to tune all the "if" statements and thresholds correctly, and the likelihood of developers getting them good enough, is vanishingly small.
Instead the program will look like "take 1000 inputs which are kind of fuzzy because we haven't bothered to classify which precise input corresponds to which precise gas and indeed we don't have to. Feed it into a neural network which was previously trained on a set of training data and is characterized by about 1000 parameters. Read off the output."
In the computer industry we now call the second approach "AI" because (1) no developer sat down and wrote an algorithm or design procedure that even remotely resembles what you described, (2) no one on the team really has a clue what the weights represent in the neural network or why they're good ones or how it works; they just treat it as a black box and accept the output, (3) its weights/connections were developed through training data. "AI" is a pretty good descriptive term because (2) and (3) also apply to the human brain and human intelligence.
I got a wife. She can tell me if I smell and bring me a beer. Let's see how long it takes them SiliconValley wizards to make an AI do that both....
Let me explain:
This is 2018. The word "software" has fallen out of favour with news media and has been replaced with two terms; "app" and "AI".
Since the software on this dedicated chip likely doesn't fit the minimum criteria to be called an "app" (isn't downloaded from an app store, and doesn't present a GUI), it must therefore be called an "AI".
Yeah, me too.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife