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Spurred by China's gains in this area, other nations can unite to share expertise in order to expand AI's current capability and ensure that AI can replicate its role in helping China deal with the novel coronavirus pandemic.

March30, 20208 min read

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From its epicenter in China, the novel coronavirus has spread to infect 414,179 people and cause no less than 18,440 deaths in at least 160 countries across a three-month span from January 2020 till date. These figures are according to the World Health Organization (WHO) Situation report as of March 25th. Accompanying the tragic loss of life that the virus has caused is the impact to the global economy, which has reeled from the effects of the pandemic.

Due to the lockdown measures imposed by several governments, economic activity has slowed around the world, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has stated that the global economy could be hit by its worst growth rate since 2009. The OECD have alerted that the growth rate could be as slow as 2.4%, potentially dragging many countries into recession. COVID-19 has, in a short period of time, emerged as one of the biggest challenges to face the 21st century world. Further complicating the response to this challenge are the grey areas surrounding the virus itself, in terms of its spread and how to treat it.

Related:We're In This Together: Business Resources, Offers, And More For MENA Entrepreneurs To Get Through The Coronavirus Pandemic

As research details emerge, the data pool grows exponentially, beyond the capacity of human intelligence alone to handle. Artificial intelligence (AI) is adept at identifying patterns from big data, and this piece will elucidate how it has become one of humanitys ace cards in handling this crisis. Using China as a case-study, Chinas success with AI as a crisis management tool demonstrates its utility, and justifies the financial investment the technology has required to evolve over the last few years.

Advancements in AI application such as natural language processing, speech recognition, data analytics, machine learning, deep learning, and others such as chatbots and facial recognition have not only been utilized for diagnosis but also for contact tracing and vaccine development. AI has no doubt aided the control of the COVID-19 pandemic and helped to curb its worst effects.

Related:Here's What Your Business Should Focus On As It Navigates The Coronavirus Pandemic

Spurred by Chinas gains in this area, other nations can unite to share expertise in order to expand AIs current capability and ensure that AI can replicate its role in helping China deal with the novel coronavirus pandemic. AI has been deployed in several ways so far, and the following are just seven of the ways in which AI has been applied as a measure to solve the pandemic:

1. DISEASE SURVEILLANCE AI With an infectious disease like COVID-19, surveillance is crucial. Human activity -especially migration- has been responsible for the spread of the virus around the world. Canada based BlueDot has leveraged machine learning and natural language processing to track, recognize, and report the spread of the virus quicker than the World Health Organization and the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In the near and distant future, technology like this may be used to predict zoonotic infection risk to humans considering variables such as climate change and human activity. The combined analysis of personal, clinical, travel and social data including family history and lifestyle habits obtained from sources like social media would enable more accurate and precise predictions of individual risk profiles and healthcare results. While concerns may exist about the potential infringement to civil liberties of individuals, policy regulations that other AI applications have faced will ensure that this technology is used responsibly.

2. VIRTUAL HEALTHCARE ASSISTANTS (CHATBOTS) The number of COVID-19 cases has shown that healthcare systems and response measures can be overwhelmed. Canada-based Stallion.AI has leveraged its natural language processing capabilities to build a multi-lingual virtual healthcare agent that can answer questions related to COVID-19, provide reliable information and clear guidelines, recommend protection measures, check and monitor symptoms, and advise individuals whether they need hospital screening or self-isolation at their homes.

Related:The Coronavirus Pandemic Versus The Digital Economy: The Pitfalls And The Opportunities

3. DIAGNOSTIC AI Immediate diagnosis means that response measures such as quarantine can be employed quickly to curb further spread of the infection. An impediment to rapid diagnosis is the relative shortage of clinical expertise required to interpret diagnostic results due to the volume of cases. AI has improved diagnostic time in the COVID-19 crisis through technology such as that developed by LinkingMed, a Beijing-based oncology data platform and medical data analysis company. Pneumonia, a common complication of COVID-19 infection, can now be diagnosed from analysis of a CT scan in less than sixty seconds with accuracy as high as 92% and a recall rate of 97% on test data sets. This was made possible by an open-source AI model that analyzed CT images and not only identified lesions but also quantified in terms of number, volume and proportion. This platform, novel in China, was powered by Paddle Paddle, Baidus open-source deep learning platform.

4. FACIAL RECOGNITION AND FEVER DETECTOR AI Thermal cameras have been used for some time now for detecting people with fever. The drawback to the technology is the need for a human operator. Now, however, cameras possessing AI-based multisensory technology have been deployed in airports, hospitals, nursing homes, etc. The technology automatically detects individuals with fever and tracks their movements, recognize their faces, and detect whether the person is wearing a face mask.

5. INTELLIGENT DRONES & ROBOTS The public deployment of drones and robots has been accelerated due to the strict social distancing measures required to contain the virus spread. To ensure compliance, some drones are used to track individuals not using facemasks in public, while others are used to broadcast information to larger audiences and also disinfect public spaces. MicroMultiCopter, a Shenzhen-based technology company, has helped to lessen the virus transmission risk involved with city-wide transport of medical samples and quarantine materials through the deployment of their drones. Patient care, without risk to healthcare workers, has also benefited as robots are used for food and medication delivery. The role of room cleaning and sterilization of isolation wards has also been filled by robots. Catering-industry centred Pudu Technology have extended their reach to the healthcare sector by deploying their robots in over 40 hospitals for these purposes.

Related:How Managers Can Weather The Impact Of The Coronavirus Pandemic On Their Businesses

6. CURATIVE RESEARCH AI Part of what has troubled the scientific community is the absence of a definitive cure for the virus. AI can potentially be a game changer as companies such as the British startup, Exscienta, has shown. Earlier this year, they became the first company to present an AI designed drug molecule that has gone to human trials. A year is all it took the algorithm to develop the molecular structure compared with the five-year average time that it takes traditional research methods.

In the same vein, AI can lead the charge for the development of antibodies and vaccines for the novel coronavirus, either entirely designed from scratch or through drug repurposing. For instance, using its AlphaFold system, Googles AI company, DeepMind, is creating structure models of proteins that have been linked with the virus in a bid to aid the science worlds comprehension of the virus. Although the results have not been experimentally verified, it represents a step in the right direction.

7. INFORMATION VERIFICATION AI The uncertainty of the pandemic has unavoidably resulted in the propagation of myths on social media platforms. While no quantitative assessment has been done to evaluate how much misinformation is out there already, it is certainly a significant figure. Technology giants like Google and Facebook are battling to combat the waves of conspiracy theories, phishing, misinformation and malware. A search for coronavirus/COVID-19 yields an alert sign coupled with links to verified sources of information. YouTube, on the other hand, directly links users to the WHO and similar credible organizations for information. Videos that misinform are scoured for and taken down as soon as they are uploaded.

While the world continues to grapple with the effects of COVID-19, positives can be drawn from the expertise and bravery of healthcare workers, as well as the complementary efforts of AI technology to their endeavors in the above listed ways. As the AI world partners with other sectors for solutions, the light at the end of this tunnel shines brighter, creating the much-needed hope the world needs in these uncertain times.

Related:Work In The Time Of Coronavirus: Here's How You Can Do Your Job From Home (Like A Pro)

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How Artificial Intelligence Is Helping Fight The COVID-19 Pandemic - Entrepreneur

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ninety One, Inc., an augmented intelligence company developing innovative software and data science solutions designed to automate cardiac remote monitoring and further Precision Medicine, announced today, announced today that Dr. Thomas Hong will be the first in the state of Texas to utilize the technology that combines state-of-the-art surveillance with early warning detection capabilities.

Ninety One, Inc. utilizes a cloud-native platform that automates the collection of data and reports from implanted cardiac devices and wearables digitizes, structures, and analyzes them with applied data science in an single-point, easy-to-use interface for patient care and innovation in research. Ninety Ones Global team of data scientists, software engineers, and modern mathematicians utilize artificial intelligence on vast amounts of data produced by these devices to predict disease episodes and disease progression. Ninety Ones ability to improve patient's quality of life, improve mortality rates, and accelerate decision making in real-time impacting patient outcomes is game-changing for cardiology, said Dr. Thomas Hong.

We are extremely excited to have our technology being used for the first time in the State of Texas. Dr. Hong has long been an innovator working in the forefront of technology and research to identify treatment pathways that lead to better patient experiences and outcomes, said Matthew Werner, Chief Commercial Officer at Ninety One.

About Dr. Thomas Hong

Dr. Hong is a cardiac electrophysiologist, specializing in treating patients with heart rhythm disorders and has served as Assistant Professor of Clinical Cardiology at Baylor College of Medicine and Houston Methodist Hospital. He has published in several peer-reviewed journals including Heart Rhythm, Journal of Cardiovascular Electrophysiology, and American Journal of Medicine.

About Ninety One

Ninety One is a privately-held, data science and native-cloud technology company, focusing on clinical advancement in predictive analytics and Precision Medicine, and has established key, exclusive partnerships with leading research and healthcare institutions in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Pursuing this mission with vigorous commitment and passion, while leveraging innovations in science, Ninety One aspires to make a material impact on disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention.

For more information please visit https://www.91.life

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Houston Cardiologist Becomes the First in State to Use Ninety One Inc.'s Artificial Intelligence and Precision Medicine Platform - Business Wire

In the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has made it to mainstream society from academic journals. The technology has achieved numerous milestones when it comes to digital transformation across society including businesses, education, and healthcare as well. Today people can do the tasks which were not even possible ten years back.

The proportion of organizations using AI in some form rose from 10 percent in 2016 to 37 percent in 2019 and that figure is extremely likely to rise further in the coming year, according to Gartners 2019 CIO Agenda survey.

While the breakthroughs in surpassing human ability at human pursuits, such as chess, make headlines, AI has been a standard part of the industrial repertoire since at least the 1980s. Then production-rule or expert systems became a standard technology for checking circuit boards and detecting credit card fraud. Similarly, machine-learning (ML) strategies like genetic algorithms have long been used for intractable computational problems, such as scheduling, and neural networks not only to model and understand human learning but also for basic industrial control and monitoring.

Moreover, AI is also the core of some of the most successful companies in history in terms of market capitalizationApple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon. Along with information and communication technology (ICT) more generally, the technology has revolutionized the ease with which people from all over the world can access knowledge, credit, and other benefits of a contemporary global society. Such access has helped lead to a massive reduction of global inequality and extreme poverty, for example by allowing farmers to know fair prices, the best crops, and giving them access to accurate weather predictions.

Following the trends, we can say that there will be big winners and losers as collaborative technologies, robots and artificial intelligence transform the nature of work. Moreover, data expertise will become exponentially more important. Across various organizations, the role of a senior manager in a deeply data-driven world is about to shift, thanks to the AI revolution. It is estimated that information hoarders will slow the pace of their organizations and forsake the power of artificial intelligence while competitors exploit it.

In the future, judgments about consumers and potential consumers will be made instantaneously and many organizations will put cybersecurity on par with other intelligence and defense priorities. Besides, open-source information and artificial intelligence collection will provide opportunities for global technological parity and soon predictive analytics and artificial intelligence could play an even more fundamental role in content creation.

With the growth of AI-enabled technologies in the future, societies will face challenges in realizing technologies that benefit humanity instead of destroying and intruding on the human rights of privacy and freedom of access to information. Also, the surging capabilities of robots and artificial intelligence will see a range of current jobs supplanted, where professional roles such as doctors, lawyers, and accountants could be replaced by artificial intelligence by the year 2025.

Moreover, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization. All the risks will arise out of human activity from certain technological development in this technology, synthetic biology, nano techno, and artificial intelligence.

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Smriti is a Content Analyst at Analytics Insight. She writes Tech/Business articles for Analytics Insight. Her creative work can be confirmed @analyticsinsight.net. She adores crushing over books, crafts, creative works and people, movies and music from eternity!!

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Futuristic Impacts of AI Over Businesses and Society - Analytics Insight

For the first time in a pandemic, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing a role like never before in areas ranging from diagnosing risk to doubt-clearing, from delivery of services to drug discovery in tackling the Covid-19 outbreak.

While BlueDoT, a Canadian health monitoring firm that crunches flight data and news reports using AI, is being credited by international reports to be the first to warn its clients of an impending outbreak on December 31, beating countries and international developmental agencies, the Indian tech space too is buzzing with coronavirus cracking activities.

CoRover, a start-up in the AI space that has earlier developed chatbots for railways ticketing platform, has now created a video-bot by collaborating with a doctor from Fortis Healthcare. In this platform, a real doctor from Fortis Healthcare not a cartoon or an invisible knowledge bank will take questions from people about Covid-19.

Apollo Hospitals has come up with a risk assessment scanner for Covid-19, which is available in six languages and guides people about the potential risk of having the virus. The Jaipur-based Sawai Man Singh Hospital is trying out a robot, made by robot maker Club First, to serve food and medicines to patients to lower the exposure of health workers to coronavirus patients.

This is the first time in healthcare that Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing are being used to create a Virtual Conversational AI platform, which assists anyone to be able to interact with doctors and have their queries answered unlike other search engines, which do not guarantee the authenticity of information, CoRovers Ankush Sabharwal claimed, while talking of its video-bot, which is likely to be launched soon.

Sabharwal told BusinessLine that answers to numerous questions have been recorded by Pratik Yashavant Patil, a doctor from Fortis Healthcare. In his AI avatar, Doctor Patil will bust myths, chat with you and will probably have answers to a lot of your questions.

Another start-up, Innoplexus AG, headquartered in Germany but founded by Indians, is claiming that its AI-enabled drug discovery platform is helping to arrive at combinations of existing drugs that may prove more efficacious in treating Covid-19 cases.

Its AI platform, after scanning the entire universe of Covid-related data has thrown up results to show that Hydroxycholoroquine or Chroloquine, an anti-malaria drug that is being prescribed as a prophylactic for coronavirus under many protocols works more effectively with some other existing drugs than when it is used alone, the company claims.

Our analysis shows that Chloroquine works more effectively in combination with Pegasys (a drug used to treat Hepatitis C] or Tocilizumab, (a rheumatoid arthritis drug) or Remdesivir (yet to be approved antiviral drug for Ebola) or Clarithromycin (an antibiotic). We are hoping to work with drug regulators and partners to test these in pre-clinical and clinical trials, said Gunjan Bhardwaj, CEO, Innoplexus.

To be sure, hundreds of clinical trials are currently under way with several cocktails of medicines for Covid-19 across the world, and some of these drugs were part of trials held in China and Taiwan. The World Health Organization (WHO) itself is monitoring a global mega clinical trial for testing drugs for Covid-19 called solidarity, which India decided to join on Friday.

Read more here:
Role of AI soars in tackling Covid-19 pandemic - BusinessLine

The agency is looking at how to best apply curated data sets to new use cases.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is closer to expanding its use of artificial intelligence and developing novel use cases.

In looking back on the early stages of the VAs newly launched artificial intelligence program, the department's Director of AI Gil Alterovitz noted ongoing questions about how to best leverage AI data sets for secondary uses.

One of the interesting challenges is often that data is collected for maybe one reason, and it may be used for analyzing and finding results for that one particular reason. But there may be other uses for that data as well. So when you get to secondary uses you have to examine a number of challenges, he said at AFCEA's Automation Transformation conference.

Some of the most pressing concerns the VAs AI program hasencountered include questions of how to best apply curated data sets to newfound use cases, as well as how to properly navigate consent of use for proprietary medical data.

Considering the specificity of use cases, particularly for advanced medical diagnostics and predictive analytics, Alterovitz has proposed releasing broader ecosystems of data sets that can be chosen and applied depending on the demands of specific AI projects.

Theres a lot to think about data sets and how they work together. Rather than release one data set, consider releasing an ecosystem of data sets that are related," he said."Imagine, for example, someone is searching for a trial you have information about. Consider the patient looking for the trial, the physician, the demographics, pieces of information about the trial itself, where its located. Having all that put together makes for an efficient use case and allows us to better work together."

Alterovitz also discussed the value of combining structured and unstructured data sets in AI projects, a methodology that Veterans Affairs has found to provide stronger results than using structured data alone.

When you look at unstructured data, there have been a number of studies in health care looking at medical records where if you look at only structured data or only unstructured data individually, you dont get as much of a predictive capability whether it be for diagnostics or prognostics as by combining them, he said.

Beyond refining and expanding these data applications methodologies, the VA also appears attentive to how to best leverage proprietary medical data while protecting personally identifying information.

The solution appears to lie in creating synthetic data sets that mimic the statistical parameters and overall metrics of a given data set while obscuring the particularities of the original data set it was sourced from.

How do you make data available considering privacy and other concerns?" Alterovitz said."One area is synthetic data, essentially looking at the statistics of the underlying data and creating a new data set that has the same statistics, but cant be identified because it generates at the individual level a completely different data set that has similar statistics."

Similarly, creating select variation within a given data set can serve to remove the possibility of identifying the patient source, You can take the data, and then vary that information so that its not the exact same information you received, but is maybe 20% different. This makes it so you can show its statistically not possible to identify that given patient with confidence.

Going forward, the VA appears intent on solving these quandaries so as to best inform expanded AI research.

A lot of the data we have wasnt originally designed for AI. How you make it designed and ready for use in AI is a challenge and one that has a number of different potential avenues, Alterovitz concluded

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VA Looking to Expand Usage of Artificial Intelligence Data - GovernmentCIO Media