According to foreign media reports, Alphabet's life sciences subsidiary Verily is hoping to use artificial intelligence technology to help communities eliminate pests, in particular reducing the potentially fatal threat to people of a species called Aedes aegypti. It is reported that Verily has been working secretly for several years on a project called "Debugging" to reduce the number of Aedes aegypti species in the United States and other regions , And this mosquito can spread some deadly viruses including dengue fever, yellow fever and Zika. According to the sources, the growing group of mosquito biologists and computer scientists at Verily are working on a "sterile insect technique" to control the number of survivors by infertile mosquitoes. Specifically, the team deliberately released male Aedes aegypti without fertility into the wild to mate with the females, and the eggs they produced did not hatch. For some species of mosquitoes that have a very limited life span and will mate only once in a lifetime, this is often the most effective quantitative control measure. For Verily, originally part of Google's R & D team at Google, it may seem surprising that the field is main. But Linus Upson, vice president of engineering at Verilog and former vice president of engineering at Google Chrome, said he was very much interested in the research on such issues as early as during his post-graduate studies in Princeton. "It was at that time that I knew that mosquitoes caused many people to die, and that the number of people killed was even behind the car accident," Upson said. It should be noted that Verily's "Insect Sterilization" invokes both machine learning and computer vision expertise to automatically recognize the gender of "Aedes aegypti". Until then, researchers often had to manually distinguish between their genders, a time-consuming and error-prone method. However, there are also many who have expressed concerns recently about how to achieve quantitative control by changing the biological structure of insects. Prior to the spread of the Zika virus in Florida, USA, a biotech company called Oxitec introduced a "killer gene" (the killer gene that allows the mosquito Life shortened and the number of vector mosquitoes plummeted) to prevent the spread of Zika virus, many local residents have voiced opposition to the move, fearing it is part of a biotech company's future human trials. In her blog, Verily revealed that she is developing prototypes that automatically feed and release the male mosquitoes and is developing new sensors that track the species and population of mosquitoes. Jason L. Rasgon, an associate professor of entomology and epidemiology at Penn State University, believes that if Verily can demonstrate the accuracy of this technique in scholarly papers, it might be able to be used around the world Widely adopted. "Any automated method that increases accuracy without accidentally releasing female Aedes aegypti is a good way." But Upson also admitted that the controls that Verily is developing are far from reaching perfect standards. He said: "At present, we are still in the initial stage of research, but we can judge the gender of mosquitoes to achieve a high accuracy." It should be noted that, in addition to this "pest control" project, Alphabet's life sciences subsidiary, Verily, is also carrying out many research and projects related to human health and life. Last year, for example, Verily announced a joint venture with GlaxoSmithKline, the largest maker of pharmaceuticals in the United Kingdom, to create a joint venture called "Galvani Bioelectronics" specializing in bioelectronic medicines. In addition, the company is also working with Swiss manufacturer Novartis to develop smart contact lenses that incorporate glucose sensors. High Speed Roll Up Door Parts, High Speed Roll Up Door Accessories, Fast Roll Up Door Parts, High Speed Rolling Door Parts, High Speed Fabric Door Parts SHENZHEN HONGFA AUTOMATIC DOOR CO., LTD , https://www.hongfarrud.com
Google subsidiary to use artificial intelligence technology to eliminate mosquitoes