News

Istanbul Fights Disease-Carrying Mosquitoes Using A Smartphone App

There are approximately 190,000 mosquito habitats in Istanbul, and 80% of them wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for humans creating ideal breeding conditions.

Published

5 years ago

April 22, 2021

Joanna Melki

istanbul fights disease carrying mosquitoes using a smartphone app

Unsplash

With the world’s attention focused on the still ongoing coronavirus pandemic, it’s easy to forget that there are many other serious health problems affecting the lives of people around the world. Istanbul is one of the countless cities that have been invaded by disease-carrying mosquitoes, and the city’s civic body has recently decided to solve this problem using modern technology.

More specifically, the Istanbul Municipality has released a smartphone app whose purpose is to identify different mosquito species in the city and create a real-time map showing their location. The gathered information will allow city officials to take appropriate actions in order to stop, or at least slow down, the spread of mosquitoes in the city of hundred names.

The biggest challenge is the fact that not all Istanbul residents own high-end smartphones with high-resolution cameras capable of taking detailed pictures of tiny mosquitoes, especially under poor lighting conditions. That said, even less-than-ideal pictures can help officials map out the general presence of mosquitoes in Istanbul, which can go a long way in tackling the infestation.

Önder Yüksel Eryiğit, a senior municipal official, said that there are approximately 190,000 mosquito habitats in Istanbul, and 80 percent of them wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for humans creating ideal breeding conditions for mosquitoes.

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Academics have warned the Istanbul Municipality about the possibility of mosquitoes infected with Zika and West Nile viruses already making the city their new home. To prevent a deadly outbreak of these and other infectious diseases, it’s important to act quickly and avoid letting the problem get out of hand.

This certainly isn’t the first application of mobile apps in the Middle East for the purposes of solving pressing healthcare issues, and it’s safe to say that it won’t be the last. For example, during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, a group of 16 technology enthusiasts from Turkey developed a contact-tracing app to instantly alert users who had contact with infected people.

News

At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value

Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.

Published

6 days ago

May 20, 2026

Nour Nasir

at io 2026 sundar pichai concedes ai must deliver real value

Google

Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.

The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.

Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.

The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.

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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.

What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.