BBS, or the Brown Bag Seminar, is an academic exchange initiative launched by the Tsinghua Urban Ergonomics Lab with support from many research groups. It serves young scholars committed to research and interested in developments at the frontiers of their fields. Sessions are held from time to time at the Urban Ergonomics Lab in the north wing of the Architecture Building at Tsinghua University.

How can we give machines a human-like sense of smell?

Odor, as a medium for information, plays a crucial role in natural ecosystems and everyday human life. People use smell to recognize environmental hazards, shape their social image, and enjoy a rich variety of experiences, including food. Food flavor is derived predominantly from retronasal olfaction rather than taste. Lacking an olfactory channel, machines have difficulty sensing odors as humans do and are even less able to decode the human experience of smell.

This session of Academic BBS features Gang Yu from the Academy of Arts & Design and The Future Laboratory, Tsinghua University. Focusing on the interdisciplinary field of machine olfaction, he will introduce recent advances in general-purpose olfactory computing, including mechanisms for acquiring and sensing odor signals, data-driven approaches to odor analysis, and the design of olfactory interfaces for human-computer interaction. His presentation is entitled Sharing Research on General-Purpose Olfactory Perception and Computing. □

About the speaker. 

Gang Yu is a doctoral student at the Academy of Arts & Design and The Future Laboratory, Tsinghua University. His research focuses on general-purpose olfactory perception and computing and human-computer interaction through olfactory interfaces. He earned his bachelor's degree in Creative Design and Intelligent Engineering (CDIE) at Xinya College, Tsinghua University, and his master's degree in the interdisciplinary field of information art at the university's Academy of Arts & Design. He has undertaken academic exchange visits to the University of Chicago and La Trobe University in Melbourne.