INTERNATIONAL

THE ELECTRONIC TONGUE SHOWS GOOD TASTE

-By Annik BIANCHINI, France

Thanks to the innovation by the Alpha MOS company, based in Toulouse and already a specialist in digitizing smell, the electronic tongue is being launched onto the taste market. This revolutionary process for industrial use makes it possible to describe the taste of liquid products by taking their sensorial characteristics into account.

The tongue of the Alpha MOS laboratories consists of a circular tray covered with glasses and linked up to a computer. This tongue with its subtle taste is remarkable. It is artificial. It is able to distinguish sweetness according to its origin, to detect certain bad tastes, etc. To test a liquid, its robotised arm dips its electronic sensors directly into each glass. Each sensor reacts to each liquid depending on its sensitivity. By analyzing the responses of all the sensors, a computer program creates the taste-print of the product studied on the screen. It is then enough to compare this result with that of the reference product. For instance, this soda is too sweat or this beer is too bitter, this fruit juice is not fresh or this syrup is a bit sour. How can an electronic instrument manage to recognize the characteristics of the taste of a liquid?

It all began 9 years ago. Jean-Christophe Mifsud, a Ph.D. graduate in neurochemistry and former student at ESSEC, a top Paris business school, set up the Alpha MOS(Multi-Organoleptic Systems) company, specialized in electronic instruments for firms, in Toulouse in the South-West of France, in 1992. He offered industrialists an unusual tool: an electronic nose. Indeed, in firms, certain methods of quality control still depend on the use of the human senses. But the problem is that human noses, which test products, may find it difficult to put across their criteria for quality and quantity to suppliers, producers and customers as they are subject to variations in time and between individuals.

"In this subjective area, nothing can be measured. But it is only possible to improve things can be measured. Two people cannot have the same sensitivity to a product, Jean-Christophe Mifsud explains. Alpha MOS has thus become the world leader in manufacturing electronic noses for industrial uses and, in 1996, the firm opened its American subsidiary in the United States where, today, it achieves nearly 50% of its turnover.

THE RESULTS IN MADAGASCAR AND IN PARIS: After the nose, came the tongue. Moreover, electronic- tongues are able to achieve things that noses are incapable of doing, such as providing extra information to analysis of smells by taking their characteristics of taste (sweet, salty, bitter or sour) into account. Besides the food-processing sector (soft-drink manufacturers, wine producers, brewers, etc), the pharmaceuticals and medical industries are a key area for this new instrument (the flavor a syrup, for instance)." The machine is able to analyze dozens upon dozens of samples, " Jean-Christoph Mifsud points out. It does not get tired and it does not make mistakes and the results are the same in the Madagascar and in Paris. So indeed, a drink manufactured by the factories of the same group will always have the same taste.

In the cosmetics and perfumery industries, the tongue is used to monitor creams and toothpaste. Nearly third of the staff at Alpha MOS work on the research and development of new products. The firm devotes more than 20% of its turnover to it and collaborates with the basic research institutes such as the National Agronomic Research Institute (INRA). The electronic tongue can also be used to quantify an element, for example the amount of caffier in a coffee, or find out where it was produced or its level of contamination (toxins, mould etc). Another area of application is the packing industry. The aim is to detect the taste of plastic in polyethylene caps used to close bottles of water.

MAN TRANSMITS HIS KNOW-HOW TO THE MACHINE: The most frequently used methods, such as employing professionals tasters or applying analytical laboratory methods also suffer from dangers associated with testing certain products and especially from their slowness. After testing two or three items, the palate is saturated, Jean-Christophe Mifsud explains.

On the score of food safety, Alpha MOS has already been chosen by the European Commission in Brussels to coordinate a research project to improve smell sensors detecting bacteria (conformity with safety standards, lack contamination, etc.) A scientific Co-operative Research Agreement is now under discussion with the American Ministry of Agriculture. However, the electronic tongue can in no way replace a distinguished wine-expert able to evaluate, for instance, the vintage of a Smith-Haut-Lafitte grand cru classe or a Chateau-Margaux, for, although if man who transmits his know-how to the machine, nothing will ever be able to repalce the experience and creativity of a quite simply human tongue.

THE END OF PRIVACY

By Otto Ulrich, Germany

Private bank accounts on the Internet can be read by anyone"- head lines like this one appear regularly in the newspapers. And it's a fact that in our information society personal information is accessible to the world at large. Whether its digitized medical records, electronically stored records of previous convictions, or simply personal tastes in consumer goods, individual privacy-a central constituent of civil society – is threatened with the extinction as the internet imposes its norms everywhere. For there's no such thing as data protection on the internet, where data sharks are busy at work fashioning comprehensive virtual biographies of netizens out of scraps of personal data. As the activities of these data prospectors show, Big Brother has been watching us for some time.

The fact is that no policy has been evolved to date for dealing with the massive surveillance of private data on the Internet. To be exact, one must distinguish between tow different types of individual privacy. On the one hand we have a traditional individual privacy which is protected by the law, and on the other hand we have an individual privacy which can be "accessed" anonymously on the net. In the age of the Internet, good governance must face the problem that the public sphere is threatening to disintegrate into scattered "Net public domains" that both compete against and form alliances with each other. Surveys indicate that many Internet users are convinced that their private online activities do not remain private- yet they continue to surf. Netizens also do not know what information about them is being collected and where it is being stored. They have no idea whether such information is accurate or not and who has access to it. Neither do they know whether information they send electronically is being manipulated or copied.

Big brother has been watching you for some time

In Germany a consumer associations study group has been examining what traces people leave behind when they go shopping on the Internet. Their findings are a real eye—opener: when people bye books over the Internet, it's not simply a case of passing on their names and addresses for delivery. Internet users also usually reveal their credit card numbers, bank account particulars, and medical history, to include what drugs they are taking. Very few e-commerce suppliers actually publicize what they do with all the data they collect. What consequences does this have? Above all we must try and understand what has caused the digital eruption of these proportions. What is the point of all this hectic digital tomfoolery? We are told that the citizens of tommorow want to send and receive their post electronically; that they want to do their shopping on the net; that they want to chat on the web. They also want to do their banking online and conduct their business with the authorities from the comfort of their armchairs. Apparently it will not be long before they can cast their vote online too. This, we are told, is the glorious future that awaits us in the cyberspace.

What is striking about this vision is how narrow it is. If our perspective on society and its multi-faceted daily activities, our search for alternatives, is limited to that of the new media, then our image of the future is merely, and fatally, a reflection of the digital view of the world. We see the world only through the binary-coded spectacles. This technological perception of the world and its people is the reason why the digiatal revolution is so reductionist, even-literally astronomical. In this clash between traditional civil society and the omnipotent claims of a digital revolution whose cultural consequences threaten to slip out of our control, the future of western civilization will be decided. It is still an open question as to whether our present political system is capable of controlling this clash of cultures. As yet, politicians do not seem to have considered the situations of citizens who have no desire to become netizens, yet who are forced into the passive suppliers of data. The latter first, and foremost, assume that anyone to whom they pass on their electronic data will do nothing- or far too little- to protect the information with which they have been entrusted from access by unauthorized third parties. And what of the netizens who go asurfing on the web? Every mouse click on a particular site sends out volumes of information on said netizens and their computers. This information is sifted out by special search engines, stored in data banks, and then analyzed by the sophisticated software programs. By collating these scraps of personal information, these programs create a very hot commodity: detailed profiles of Internet users and their habits.

Data Protection Officers for a long time suspected that intimate biographies of Net users are finishing up on the desks of personal managers. So-called "data warehouse congresses" discuss how best to distil the last drop of information on individual habits and preferences from personal data culled from the Internet. Such practices give rise to a new principle of conduct: we must assume that absolutely no private information can be protected a priori from prying eyes., so long as it can be stored and transmitted in electronic form. The experience of history teaches us that the Internet will not of itself generate the kind of conditions that foster democracy. Technical innovations- such as the printing press, radio or television-have always had to be first mastered by the general public before they could be fashioned into instruments to serve the further democratization of knowledge. Only when the opportunities offered by this new medium are clearly recognized can the appropriation of the Internet technology lead to such a development. Freedom or control? At present once the free world of cyberspace is being transformed into a world in which our every move is monitored-a bleak out-look for the future of democracy and civil rights. Faced with 'more perfect control than exists in the real world', in the words of Lawrence Lessing of the Harvard University, it is just not possible to protect the privacy of the individual. By what criteria are we to judge the digital revolution? One thing is certain: the core values of our society can't directly be nurtured by bits and bytes. Technology and society have always been at odds with each other. And the triumphal progress of the Internet is being accompanied by a concomitant loss of political control over technology. Can the future of our society really be described by such reductive metaphors as 'the information society', 'cyberspace', and 'e-commerce'?

Reconciliation between the Internet and democratic civil society, with its entirely different value system, has not yet even begun. Good governance has the task of bringing the democratic needs of citizens whose roots are still very much local, in line with their yearning to travel far afield and to become virtual citizens of the world. Otherwise historians will record how the digital revolution at the end of the twentieth century destroyed a major achievement of the middle-class revolutions of the nine-teenth century: privacy.

(Dr. Otto Ulrich is a member of the European Academy for Research into the Consequences of Scientific Developments. Text courtesy: Deutschland E4 N 3/2001 June/July, embassy of Germany in Kathmandu).