SENSing hardware burnt to feel physically non-trivial informATION – Sensation

Metrological systems are precious for quantifying our physical world. However, is there anything to recognize physically complex patterns? Smells, scents, fragrances are as many semantic notions that are difficult to quantize, but so intuitive to classify for the brain. Far from our sensors standards, a sense is exclusively hardware that can identify physically very complex classes, undefinable stimuli, and unknown environments. “Sensation” suggests not to wait the chimeric time mankind will invent as many sensors as synthetic molecules, and proposes to study the ability for a device to recognize constitutionally complex smells, without software nor program. Thanks to hybrid micrometric devices that are both environmentally sensitive and able to interconnect at the fashion of dendrites and synapses of our neurons, the goal is to study their networking and stimulation to classify smells on a hedonic scale. Conducting-polymer based electrochemical devices will be, designed to mimic brain’s behavior on the one hand, and on the other hand, materials will be selected based on their multi-chemo-specificity on the input layer of a many-layer system, integrated on less than 10 mm². Thanks to our preliminary results on dendritic morphogenesis for organic electrochemical transistors, and multivariate data analysis of the versatile chemo-specificity for doped polymer semiconductors to recognize elementary gases, the aim for the mission is to use organic electronics as single technological node to manufacture a device that behaves like our nose in the project’s horizon. As autonomous system in both data generation and management, the conception of such autonomous and non-vulnerable hardware is, first of all, a societal challenge, for acceptability of a trustworthy but more intrusive artificial intelligence (AI).