SGER: Molecular Design of Intelligent Sensors for Selected Chemical Warfare Agents using Support Vector Machines

This SGER grant is awarded to Professors Omowunmi Sadik and Walker Land of SUNY Binghamton by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program (MPS) to apply Support Vector Machines (a computational intelligence technique) to analytical data on chemical warfare simulants. The analytical data originates from a hybrid sensor based on gas chromatography coupled with microarrays of conducting polymer sensing elements, a so-called electronic nose. The data from these arrays is complex and is appropriately studied using advanced pattern recognition techniques. This collaboration connects an analytical chemist with a computer scientist. The exploratory aspect is the opportunity for analytical chemists to take advantage of the advent of the new computational intelligence method, which has been successfully applied by the coPI to breast cancer detection.

So called 'electronic nose' devices have the potential to serve as sensitive and selective detectors of mixtures of chemicals. There are many applications of sensors, including homeland security, ascertaining food quality, environmental monitoring, and production process and transportation engineering. More sophisticated data analysis is required to bring next generation sensors into fruition. The application of computer intelligence methods is promising in this regard.