April 22, 2025 - Laurianne Paravisini, PhD & Richard Whitcomb, Osmo

Scent Teleportation
Laurianne Paravisini, Ph.D. & Richard Whitcomb, Osmo

Speaker Bios
Laurianne Paravisini, Ph.D.
Laurianne Paravisini is the Director of Analytical Chemistry at Osmo and an accomplished leader in flavor research and analytical chemistry. She holds a Ph.D. in Flavor Chemistry from the Center for Taste and Feeding Behavior in France. Before Osmo, throughout her academic and industry career, Laurianne has focused on understanding the molecular and sensory drivers of food and flavor perception. She joined Osmo to build the world’s largest analytical database for odors and give computers a sense of smell.

Richard Whitcomb is the Chief Technology Officer at Osmo, where his work focuses on leveraging large virtual libraries to discover novel fragrance and insect control molecules. Osmo aims to develop computational methods that explore vast chemical spaces, with the long-term goal of bringing the sense of smell to computers and enabling software to interact seamlessly with the chemical world around us. Osmo applies techniques similar to molecular docking to screen extensive virtual libraries of make-on-demand molecules against specific targets, identifying novel compounds that can modulate

olfactory responses or control insect behavior. He aims to revolutionize the fields of perfumery and pest control by harnessing the power of computational chemistry and artificial intelligence. Before joining Osmo, Whitcomb served as the Principal Architect on the autonomous vehicle AI Infrastructure platform at NVIDIA, where he applied his expertise in artificial intelligence to the cutting-edge field of self-driving technology. Prior to that, he worked across many industries, applying AI and data foundations to unique problems.

Abstract

Imagine:

- being able to smell the lilies that grew near your childhood home from anywhere in the world.
- visiting the Sistine Chapel and sending a loved one back home the scent of old paint and plaster.
- watching a movie about sailors lost at sea and smelling the saltwater throughout the theater.
- capturing the scent of your soon-to-be-husband on your wedding day, so you can savor that moment forever.

This is the promise of Scent Teleportation, a technology that captures a smell in one part of the world and releases it in another. Much of the digital world of today is the result of teaching computers how to see and hear. Osmo’s goal is to do the same for scent — making it easy to capture, analyze, and reproduce scents. In a first step to create what RGB is to vision, Osmo leveraged Graph Neural Networks to generate the first map of odors as reliable as a human in describing odor quality (Lee et al., 2022). On a prospective validation set of 400 odorants, the model-generated odor profiles more closely matched the trained panel mean (n=15) than did the median panelist. Ongoing research and development efforts at Osmo focus on creating a more advanced odor map, encompassing hundreds of monomolecular odorants as well as complex mixtures, with the ultimate goal of giving computers a sense of smell. This seminar will showcase the unprecedented analytical chemistry and machine learning advancements that drive this work.