Author: Ben Michaels

Talk about building a better proverbial mousetrap, Microsoft’s robotic mosquito trap can distinguish one insect species from another. Leveraging machine learning technology, the trap can be programmed to distinguish between different species of mosquitoes.  Ethan Jackson, a Microsoft researcher heads up Project Premonition, a research effort aimed at giving epidemiologists better tools for tracking disease outbreaks. While showing off how the high-tech trap works at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Boston, Jackson said that testing the traps last summer in Houston, Texas,  showed they could determine the species successfully 80 percent of the time just through infrared scanning....