DARPA Nose Competition

DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) is sponsoring a new competition to develop “… a highly versatile and sensitive broad-spectrum device capable of detecting odorants under the challenge of real-world conditions”. Obviously the military and security implications are immense, but so is the potential to develop further knowledge about the inner workings of one of the most primitive CNS pathways.
Like the X-Prize devoted to Healthcare we reported on earlier, DARPA’s projects attract some of the top scientists from around the world and leverages their knowledge and inspiration to produce exponential gains in the field.
Evolved Machines, Inc. (Palo Alto, CA) has been selected as a prime contractor to engineer an artificial olfaction system incorporating “brain-like” neural pattern recognition. In their press release, DARPA labeled the project “RealNose”, and the agency emphasizes that it will be “the first program to tackle the separation of multiple odorants in the presence of unknown backgrounds that characterize the detection problems presented in real-world settings.”
As with so many advances in medicine which evolved from military initiatives, the potential for medical gain goes beyond just the increased knowledge of neural networks, it could provide “simplified” detectors for cancers, infectious diseases, diabetes, and many other illnesses shown to be detectable by canines (among other animals).
Darpa Press Release at SAIC…
Evolved Machines Website
MIT News Release: Sniffing Out Success…
Flashbacks: No, Not Another Electronic Nose! ; Nanowire-based Electronic Nose; E-nose to Detect Lung CA; SPOT-NOSED: A Hi-Tech Nose For Disease Detection; “Electronic Nose” to Aid Asthma Diagnosis; Detecting Infection With E-nose