Alex Wiltschko, Ph.D.
Hi, my name is Alex Wiltschko. And if you remember only one thing about me, it’s that I’m obsessed with smell.
I grew up in a small town in Texas, where neither computers nor perfume were popular. I inherited both my Dad’s passion for computers and his sensitive nose, and became obsessed with software and scent, becoming both a computer nerd and — oddly enough — a perfume collector. I knew a few kids growing up who loved computers as much as me, but never did find a Texan as scent-obsessed as myself. Given my interests, I wasn’t exactly in the running to be the most popular kid in high school. But I couldn’t help but follow my passions. I ended up studying olfactory neuroscience all the way through graduate school … and learned how little we still know about our sense of smell.
Halfway through graduate school, my Dad got sick. It first manifested in ways we didn’t catch early on. He spoke less and less. He got little tremors in his arm that he couldn’t control. And then he had a seizure while on vacation. After some scans, doctors found a set of tumors in his brain, some the size of golfballs. After more tests, he was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme. We’ll never know how long it was growing before we caught it. It could have been weeks, months, or years. I left school to take care of him until he passed away 6 months later. It was the hardest stretch of my life, but I’m grateful to have been there for him all the way until the end. He was calm, gentle, funny, and I still miss him deeply.
It took me a while to process all that happened. Years later, I returned to those memories with a scientist’s mind, and I learned that some cancers have a smell. Diving deeper, I looked for a pioneering research paper. Instead I found a slew of papers, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, that collectively posed the simple question that would come to guide my life’s work: Why can’t computers understand smell? Why can’t they be constantly monitoring the world around us for opportunity, danger, and disease? Why do we lose people we love before their time when we know we can do better? The same sense of smell that brings great joy to our lives can also be used to prevent pain and suffering. Giving machines a sense of smell means giving everyone a chance at a better life, and we have to mount an all-out attack on this challenge.
My obsession took hold, but I was on a meandering path. I co-founded a company called Syllable commercializing my PhD work analyzing animal behavior with computer vision, which was sold to Neumora, a big biotech company. I co-founded a second company called Whetlab that was an early Machine Learning as a Service company, which we sold to Twitter. At Twitter, I learned industrial-scale machine learning, and then I moved to Google Brain, doing more of the same. After a year of pure-computer science projects, I felt it was time to dedicate myself full-on to the historic challenge of digitizing our sense of smell – a journey that would start at Google and continue with the launch of a brand new company, Osmo, dedicated exclusively to this mission.
