“We’ve known that smell contains information we can use to detect disease,” he says. “But computers can’t speak that language and can’t interpret that data yet.”

While that’s his long-term goal for the company, in the near term he wants Osmo to make safer, more sustainable aroma molecules for fragrances in everyday products like perfume, shampoo, insect repellant and laundry detergent.

— Alex Wiltschko, CEO and co-founder of AI startup Osmo, on why it is important to teach computers to smell. Read more in Led by a former Google researcher, this company wants to give computers a sense of smell—here’s how it works at CNBC.

The work resulted in a “principal odour map” – the olfactory equivalent of the colour palette you might use on a computer. “Anybody who’s looked at a map of colour in Photoshop knows intuitively what’s going on,” says Mainland, and just as the “colour space” in such a map helps us say that purple is closer to red than to green, the team’s odour map allowed them to locate scents in a kind of multi-dimensional “smell space”.

“RGB is three-dimensional, but you can depict it on a flat piece of paper,” [Alex] Wiltschko says. “There’s three channels of colour information in our eye, but there’s 350 channels of odour information in our nose.

— Read more in ‘Giving computers a sense of smell’: the quest to scientifically map odours at The Guardian.