What An AI Nose Knows

Maker News
What An AI Nose Knows

By Dale Dougherty

Dale Dougherty

DALE DOUGHERTY is the leading advocate of the Maker Movement. He founded Make: Magazine 2005, which first used the term “makers” to describe people who enjoyed “hands-on” work and play. He started Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and this event has spread to nearly 200 locations in 40 countries, with over 1.5M attendees annually. He is President of Make:Community, which produces Make: and Maker Faire.

In 2011 Dougherty was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business. He believes that the Maker Movement has the potential to transform the educational experience of students and introduce them to the practice of innovation through play and tinkering.

Dougherty is the author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane Conrad. He is co-author of "Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities" with Peter Hirshberg and Marcia Kadanoff.

View more articles by Dale Dougherty

Make:cast #21 – Benjamin Cabé

Like many of us during Covid-19, Benjamin Cabé was baking sourdough bread but he was at home in France. He wondered how he might tell if his dough was done proofing. He began working on an artificial nose that uses physical sensors to detect gas but also uses machine learning to identify the smell. His project is on the cover of Make: Volume 77. In this conversation, we talk about how his nose works, how it knows what it does and the limits of what it knows.

Subscribe to Make:cast on Itunes or Google Podcasts. You can also find it on Spotify, Deezer, Podcast Addict, PodChaser and Spreaker. A list of previous episodes of Make:cast can be found here.

Benjamin Cabé’s project, titled “Second Sense” in Make: V77, is about the build of an artificial nose. It does three things: it uses a gas sensor to detect what’s in the air; it uses a neural network to identify the smell and then it displays a result on a Wio terminal. Oh, and it’s all embedded in a 3D printed enclosure in the shape of a nose. The build is described in detail in the magazine.

The components for the Artificial Nose; its enclosure and final assembly

Our conversation is more about how you know what an artificial nose can and can’t do. We talk about the need for an open catalog of scents (or smells, if you prefer), which might be developed by the community and would help machine-learning applications based on smell become easier to build and scents easier to identify. We also talk about how you might not need to identify what a smell is, just that it’s potentially harmful, like food burning on the stove. In short, there’s a whole world to discover right under your artificial nose.

Benjamin works at Microsoft by day and he’s says he wouldn’t have thought of himself as a maker. But the problem of identifying certain conditions by smell was a tangible, physical thing and it was something to tinker with. He is experienced in computing from his work but this application caused him to jump in and learn machine-learning. He’s still perfecting his bread recipes.

Benjamin Cabé at the mic
Benjamin Cabé

Links:

About Make Magazine – V77

Buy Make Magazine – V77

How burnt food smells

Artificial Nose Github Repo

@kartben – Benjamin Cabé on Twitter.

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By Dale Dougherty

Dale Dougherty

DALE DOUGHERTY is the leading advocate of the Maker Movement. He founded Make: Magazine 2005, which first used the term “makers” to describe people who enjoyed “hands-on” work and play. He started Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and this event has spread to nearly 200 locations in 40 countries, with over 1.5M attendees annually. He is President of Make:Community, which produces Make: and Maker Faire.

In 2011 Dougherty was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business. He believes that the Maker Movement has the potential to transform the educational experience of students and introduce them to the practice of innovation through play and tinkering.

Dougherty is the author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane Conrad. He is co-author of "Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities" with Peter Hirshberg and Marcia Kadanoff.

View more articles by Dale Dougherty
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