Can Machines Really Smell? The AI Innovation You Never Saw Coming

The Jeff Bullas Show

Kordel K France is the founder and lead engineer of pioneering machine sensing startup Theta Diagnostics.

For the better part of the last decade, he has been working with his incredible team to build a new type of nanotechnology sensor and multi-modal AI platform that enables machines’ sense of smell.

His driving mission is to give machines the sense of hyper-sensitive smell through machine olfaction and accelerate a new paradigm in robotics and AI.

Kordel is a technologist, inventor, and multi-disciplined engineer whose reward function is maximized by teaching machines to solve complex problems through AI.

While most of his recent work is contained in the bootstrapping of Theta and its acquirers, he has also had the privilege of working with and learning from incredible engineers at some of the world’s best companies in solving challenging technology problems.

Although his focus has been on the engineering of sensor systems and multi-modal AI, he has deep manufacturing and hardware development experience that enables him as a comprehensive product developer and technical leader.

His experience spans computer vision, autopilot development, aircraft design & simulation, natural language processing, swarm intelligence, and optics.

What you will learn

• How AI can give machines a sense of smell.
• The importance of integrating all five human senses into AI for achieving human-level intelligence.
• The role of machine olfaction in detecting medical conditions through breath analysis.
• The potential of AI in agriculture, starting with self-driving tractors.
• Kordel's journey into AI, inspired by his childhood experiences on a farm.
• The evolution and current state of AI education, and the importance of math and statistics in AI development.
• How AI models need to be explainable, especially in critical fields like healthcare.