AI Case Study

Verily, a life sciences and healthcare company under Google's parent company Alphabet, has partnered with Singapore's National Environment Agency to bring its mosquito sex-sorting technology to the city-state. The technology will be employed in the second phase of the agency's field study called "Project Wolbachia -- Singapore", which experiments with using male Wolbachia-carrying mosquitoes to control the insect's population.

This sex-sorting technology is developed under the Debug Project funded by Verily and uses a computer vision algorithm and artificial intelligence to cut down on the time spent separating male and female mosquitoes manually.

As part of the project, it was used to release over a million Wolbachia-infected male Aedes mosquitoes in communities in far north Queensland in Australia in April where Verily is partners with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the University of Queensland and James Cook University. These infected mosquitoes are sterile and do not bite or spread diseases but when they mate with female mosquitoes, the resulting eggs will fail to hatch, hence helping to suppress the population of the mosquitoes.