Alistair Pernigo Secures Fellowship to Advance Machine Olfaction

Pernigo, a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab, focuses on enabling machines to detect and interpret complex chemical signals. Over the next year, he intends to refine his existing sensing prototype and conduct rigorous performance validation alongside academic partners. His previous work includes co-authoring the SmellNet paper, which provided a dataset covering 50 substances and 43 mixtures, presented at the 2026 International Conference on Learning Representations.

Jim O'Shaughnessy, founder of the investment firm OSV, noted that Pernigo's methodology could solve long-standing barriers in machine sensory perception. Beyond his MIT role, Pernigo co-founded Timeless Way, a laboratory dedicated to studying how both living and engineered systems perceive their environments. The fellowship, which includes a grant of up to $100,000, marks Pernigo as the twenty-second recipient selected by the program this year.