Google Uses Old Books And Technology To Fight Insect-Borne Diseases

(CTN News) – The number of people affected by insect-borne diseases each year is staggering, which is why Google is developing a new technology that will be able to combat such diseases, using decades-old datasets that were mined by Google Books over the past decade.

Google Brain is using decades-old datasets mined from Google Books in combination with a newly developed sensory map for odour in order to combat this major global health issue, according to the company’s blog post published yesterday.

According to the research, this might be due to the fact that the team recently discovered that the sense of smell of mosquitoes is not that distinct from ours.

Climate change has been linked to the spread of insects, such as ticks and mosquitoes. This can result in outbreaks of dengue fever, Lyme disease, and malaria as a result of climate change.

As part of my team, I am working on giving computers the ability to smell.

We found that as we reviewed the predictions of the neural networks we trained to predict what molecules smell like to people, we also found that the neural networks could also predict how insects’ brains react to the same molecules according to the ‘smell parts’ of their brains,” says Alex Wiltschko, an ex-Google Brain researcher who has become an entrepreneur in residence at Google Ventures.

A team of researchers from Google Brain realized that if they were able to train their computers to recognize odours that repel mosquitoes, then those computers could help predict safe, inexpensive, and effective repellents that could be used to halt the spread of insect-borne illnesses.

In order to develop this technology, the team identified relevant research completed by the US Department of Agriculture during World War II in order to identify relevant findings.

According to Alex, they had learned about a dataset in which they tested thousands of repellents – much more than the 20 repellants we had tested,” he said.

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