Extending Our Perception

Extending Our Perception

The world is rich with information hidden from human senses and not captured by our algorithms. The next era of AI will require Hypersensory Intelligence – AI and novel sensors engineered together to perceive reality in fundamentally new ways, catalysing breakthroughs across disciplines.

Programme development

As we develop a programme in the Extending Our Perception opportunity space, we're sharing our current thinking in the form of a programme thesis. This programme is expected to launch in summer 2026.


Hypersensory Intelligence: Olfactory Perception

While AI systems can already see, hear, and generate complex content, they still cannot access a vast and information-rich part of the world: smell. This programme thesis outlines an ambition to build a general-purpose artificial sense of smell, matching or exceeding biological performance on defined tasks, and enabling machines to detect and interpret chemical signals in the real world.

From identifying disease to preventing the $1 trillion annual cost of food waste, making the chemical world computationally legible could unlock major advances across health, food, and the environment.

The barrier is not a lack of sensors, but a lack of shared infrastructure. Unlike vision or audio, the field of digital olfaction is fragmented, with no standardised data, hardware, or representations.

We propose to change this by building a unified foundation: a large-scale, cross-domain dataset of chemical signals, new machine learning approaches to understand them, and sensing systems that can apply this knowledge in practice.


Read the programme thesis          Share your thoughts

 

Meet the programme team

Our Programme Directors are supported by a core team that provides a blend of operational coordination and highly specialised technical expertise.

Headshot of Claire Donoghue

Claire Donoghue

Programme Director

Claire has worked in AI for two decades in both academia and industry, delivering solutions across healthcare, materials design, manufacturing, and occupational safety. Previously Senior Director in Data Science and AI at AstraZeneca, and before that at 3M, she is an inventor on 19 patents and holds a PhD in machine learning from Imperial College London.

A photo of Mike Farrar standing outside a building

Mike Farrar

Programme Specialist

Mike is a condensed matter physicist by training and joined ARIA from his postdoc at Oxford, where he conducted research on novel photovoltaics. Prior to this, he was responsible for the set-up of several high volume, thin-film deposition operations across the globe for the world's largest electronics original equipment manufacturers. Mike supports ARIA as an operating partner from Pace.

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