USF professors build smart mosquito trap to fight disease like dengue

Professors at the University of South Florida have built a "smart" mosquito trap that uses artificial intelligence to help combat mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever. USF dengue fever research Researchers at USF created a trap that can identify hundreds of mosquitoes at one time."There are about 45 different types of mosquito species in Florida alone, and close to 3,500 in nature, but only a handful spread diseases," Professor Sriram Chellappan, with USF's Bellini College of AI, Cybersecurity and Computing said. "So, identifying which spread diseases is the holy grail of mosquito surveillance. But the problem is, nobody can do all the thousand. So almost 90%, 95% are simply discarded."Without this device, professors explain that a county would trap mosquitoes, then manually identify them."We don't do trapping, but once the mosquitoes get trapped, they fall into this chamber, they get stuck on a sticky pad, which you will see soon and then, we have cameras that will take pictures,