At PyCon Indonesia, I spoke about a project we worked on with the World Mosquito Program.
The World Mosquito Program (WMP) modifies mosquitoes with a bacteria — Wolbachia. This reduces their ability to carry deadly viruses. (It makes me perversely happy that we’re infecting mosquitoes now 😉.)
Modifying mosquitoes is an expensive process. With a limited set of “good mosquitoes”, it is critical to find the best release points that will help them replicate rapidly.
But planning the release points took weeks of manual effort. It involved ground personnel going through several iterations.
So our team took high-resolution satellite images, figured out the building density, estimated population density based on that, and generated a release plan. This model is 70% more accurate and reduced the time from 3 weeks to 2 hours.
More details at the Gramener website.
The slides for the talk are below.