AI sent first coronavirus alert, but underestimated the danger

The humans were 30 minutes slower but faster to recognize the significance of the outbreak

Research suggests that an AI beat humans to the punch in warning the world about the coronavirus. But it didn’t get all the credit, because it needed humans to recognize the danger.

Earlier reports had suggested that a Canadian epidemiologist had raised the first warnings of the outbreak, using an algorithm called BlueDot that scanned news reports and airline ticketing data to predict the spread of the disease.

Associated Press reporters Christina Larson and Matt O’Brien were dubious about the claim, and decided to draw up a timeline of when global alert systems noticed the signals.

They determined that the first warning outside China of the virus came from the automated HealthMap system at Boston Children’s Hospital, which scans online news and social media reports for signals of spreading disease.

How the race unfolded:

At 11:12PM local time on December 30, it sent an alert about unidentified pneumonia cases in  Wuhan — but only ranked its seriousness as a three out of five. It was days before human researchers at HealthMap recognized the dangers of the outbreak.

Half an hour after the HealthMap system had sent its alert, the human volunteer-led Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMed) produced a more detailed warning. Marjorie Pollack, ProMed’s deputy, had first noticed the signs four hours before the HealthMap alert.

She had received an email informing her of a Chinese social media post discussing a Wuhan health agency notice of “unexplained pneumonia” and sent her team to investigate. Their analysis led their coronavirus alert to be sent out slightly later than the AI, but it also meant that they could provide a more comprehensive warning. 

Human-AI combo offers best alerts

Both the systems were credited with producing their alerts before the BlueDot warning.

AP reporter Christina Larson tweeted that the best alert systems combined the complementary strengths of human and artificial intelligence.

The AI systems can scan data from online news, social media and government reports for early signals of an outbreak, and then notify human experts from agencies such as the World Health Organization, who can make more detailed investigations.

Her research shows that while AI-powered disease-alert systems can be useful tools, they shouldn’t be taking over public healthcare policy.

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How CHINA vanquished the Coronavirus using AI

1000's ⇰ 100's ⇰ 10's

China was the origin of the novel coronavirus spread.

 In the Chinese territories, it infected around 80,000 people and killed more than 3,000.

 In the beginning, the outbreak was massive, but in recent weeks, they managed to contain it. For a country, the size of China with 1.4 billion inhabitants, reporting 50 cases a day is just a drop in the ocean.

So, through this blog I wanted to to illustrate how China is managing to win the war against COVID-19 using advanced technologies.

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China is known for harvesting massive amounts of data from its citizens.

They have a network of more than 200 million video surveillance cameras 

distributed around the country.

 Apart from these, they also installed bio-metric scanners in the doorway of apartments. When a person decides to leave his apartment, he has to scan his face as a sort of registration. From then on, the Intelligent System processing the data knows that the person is outside and can track his whereabouts via video surveillance system.

 Central databases stores all of this information, machine learning algorithms then crunch the data and calculates the potential social interactions of the person.

The central database also gathers data from additional sources. One of these is the WeChat app which is used by about 1 billion people monthly just in China. The app conveniently combines localisation, social media, chats and e-wallets into one system.

So how does this benefits in controlling COVID-19. Lets check

First Advantage:

The payments occur using contactless virtual cards and without exchanging real money. Thus, this lack of physical exchange automatically reduces the dissemination of the virus.

Second Advantage:

The localisation feature which provides accurate location of the individual.

 Whereas the surveillance cameras have a limited reach, the location provided by WeChat will give the system precise information regarding the whereabouts of the person.

 If a person comes in close contact with someone infected with the virus, the system can immediately alert him and get him to avoid that person.

Third Advantage:

Since the e-wallet includes information about shops visited together with the purchases, the two can be combined.

 From the location of the shop, once can deduce if a person shopping might have contracted the virus because a few minutes earlier, an infected person was shopping in that same shop.

 The purchases, on the other hand, might provide information regarding the wellbeing of the individual. An Artificial Intelligence (AI) system can easily infer that if certain items are purchased, then the person or someone close to him is most probably ill. 

The chats on WeChat further corroborate this hypothesis since they are automatically analysed using the AI.

 The system then flags the person as a potential case, and a medical team visits him to perform specific tests.

Fourth Advantage:

 Using the social media element which is essential to identify the social circle of the person and reach to them in case of an infection.

The system is so sophisticated that it can list most of the people who interacted with an infected person in the previous two weeks.

The government then imposes self-quarantine for at least fourteen days on these people.

Every citizen also gets an automatic Health code which can be either; red, amber or green. This coding determines the mobility of the person.

A green colour means that the person is free to roam unrestricted. 

People who just returned from abroad or might have been in contact with an infected person have a yellow code, and their movement is restricted.

 Those who are probably infected fall under the red category and they have to stay in quarantine.

Thus, the main motto is clear that the Chinese government willing to identify hotspots before they get out of control.For sure, it is the highest tech epidemic control ever created in the history of the world. The system is considered by many as unconventional and verging on the extreme, but it seems to be giving good results.

 Thus we have to ask ourselves what extent we are ready to go, to save further lives

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How AI Could Help Stop the Spread of the Coronavirus

WHAT IS CORONA VIRUS?

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), coronaviruses form part of a family of viruses that cause various illnesses, from the common cold to more serious illnesses like SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). 

They’re originally transmitted between animals and humans. For example, SARS is believed to have been transmitted from bats to people, and MERS from camels to people. 

A number of known coronaviruses are found in animals that haven’t infected humans. 

The source of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus is still widely speculated, although it does share some similarities to the 2003 SARS virus which originated from bats. However, the seafood market in Wuhan, Hubei, is believed to be the original source. Scientists are analyzing various wildlife samples, so far it appears that the first transmission was made from animal to human, and the virus then spread through human-to-human contact.

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Here’s how AI could help stop the spread of the coronavirus:

Technologies like AI (Artificial Intelligence) could assist in identifying and halting the spread of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus – and, in fact, they already have. 

BlueDot, a venture-backed startup, has built an advanced AI platform that can process billions of pieces of data, like the world’s air travel network, that would assist in identifying outbreaks. In the case of the coronavirus, BlueDot issued its first alert of 31 December 2019. This was even before the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), made its own statement on 6 January 2020. 

Kamran Khan is an infectious disease physician and professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Toronto. He was on the frontline as a healthcare worker during the SARS outbreak at the start of the century. As the mastermind behind BlueDot he said,

 “We are currently using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to process vast amounts of unstructured text data, currently in 65 languages, to track outbreaks of over 100 different diseases, every 15 minutes around the clock.” He continued, “If we did this work manually, we would probably need over a hundred people to do it well. These data analytics enable health experts to focus their time and energy on how to respond to infectious disease risks, rather than spending their time and energy gathering and organizing information.”

Analysis done by BLUEDOT

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Here’s a taste of what else we might see from this incredible technology: 

According to Colleen Greene, the GM of Healthcare at DataRobot:

“AI could predict the number of potential new cases by area and which types of populations will be at risk the most. This type of technology could be used to warn travelers so that vulnerable populations can wear proper medical masks while traveling.”

Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Haven, Vahid Behzadan: 

“AI can help with the enhancement of optimization strategies. For instance, Dr. Marzieh Soltanolkottabi’s research is on the use of machine learning to evaluate and optimize strategies for social distancing (quarantine) between communities, cities, and countries to control the spread of epidemics. Also, my research group is collaborating with Dr. Soltanolkottabi in developing methods for enhancement of vaccination strategies leveraging recent advances in AI, particularly in reinforcement learning techniques.”

These were the different views at the starting stages of COVID19.

Hence Governments and health organizations need to take AI into consideration when it comes to tackling this disease, or risk facing even more casualties as a result of not using any resources that they can. 

GO CORONA!!! GO!!!

AI TOWARDS SOCIAL GOOD

BRIEF INTRO ABOUT 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Just as how humans learn, AI have to ‘learn’.

 Up to now, the AI learns by being told on what to learn, what to ignore. 

The humans can give the AI reference data from physical input sources like sensors or huge data base of a particular subject of interest. AI makes decision and takes action by basically comparing data with desired parameters set by the human instruction sets.

"Instructions! To do this and that"

Basically, we humans wanted the AI's main function is 

To be an unquestioning loyal slave.

The current AI have begun to predict Human actions. Even as simple as typing this article in Microsoft word. This rudimentary AI is predicting the spelling of words and grammar even before the word itself is completed by the human. All this has been taken for granted as a norm expected by each successive human generation.

In a situation where a medical based AI is analyzing the chances of survival between a mother and her unborn baby after a car accident. Would an AI decide to sacrifice an unborn child to save the mother? Humans would almost do otherwise. Such critical decisions have always been best left to the humans, but that is about to change.

AI's STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPMENT IN HEALTH

CORONA VIRUS

The mysterious Coronavirus (COVID-19)

 is not an unknown subject anymore; with it spreading at an alarming rate, there have been over 8,62,495 infections 42,510 deaths that have been caught worldwide.

While every country is working hard in order to quell the virus through quarantines, lock-downs, travel limits and accelerated research, it seemed to have gone out of control.

However, the question of whether technologies like AI can help has arisen?

It is for sure that at the moment, Artificial intelligence is not going to stop the outbreak of the new virus or replace the role of the experts in it. 

Considering that AI is constantly being used in detection and diagnosis of the disease, below are 

9 ways

 how Artificial intelligence is currently being used to manage and fight COVID-19:

1.Drones to deliver medical supplies:

One of the safest and the fastest methods of delivering medical supplies during an outbreak is through drones.

 Terra Drone is currently using its unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver and transport medical supplies with little risk between Xinchang County’s disease Control Centre and the People’s Hospital.

2.To identify, track and forecast disease outbreaks:

BlueDot, a venture-backed startup has managed to build a sophisticated AI platform that processes billions of pieces of data to identify these outbreaks. This data can include the world’s air travel network, health reports, and many others. With respect to the case of the coronavirus, BlueDot made its first alert on December 31st, 2019. 

3.To process healthcare claims:

 With the virus spreading like a wildfire, not only are the clinical operations of healthcare systems taxed but also the business and administrative divisions of it. A blockchain platform offered by Ant Financial is assisting in speeding up the processing claims by reducing the number of face-to-face interactions between patients and hospital staff.

4.To help in the diagnosis of the virus:

 Incidentally, BlueDot is not the only organisation to have successfully leveraged AI in helping to curb the coronavirus. Alibaba (a Chinese tech company) said AI can detect Covid-19 in just 20 seconds! The company has said that with the help of AI in CT Scans, it can detect Coronavirus in just 20 seconds. The model has a precision rate of 96% and if doctors were to do the same, it would take up to 20 minutes. The algorithm was built by Alibaba’s research institute named Damo Academy. The AI model was trained with the help of data from more than 5,000 confirmed cases and can identify patients with the deadly virus in CT scans.

5.Chatbots to share information and spread awareness: 

AI-based Chatbots are an essential means of communication for people to access free online health consultation services, updates on the latest travel procedures and disruptions, and more.

6.Everyday Wear for Precaution and Protection:

 An Israeli startup, Sonovia aims at to arming healthcare systems with face masks made from their AI-based anti-pathogen, anti-bacterial fabric that relies on metal-oxide nanoparticles.
With fever being one of the symptoms of the virus, security staff at Hongyuan Park in eastern China’s Hangzhou city have been given AI-enabled glasses that can detect the body temperature of visitors. Developed by an Hangzhou-based startup, Rokid Corp, these glasses work along the concept of non-contact thermal augmented reality. Fitted with a camera and a cable, the regular-looking glasses detect anybody with a fever – immediately sending alerts and making digital records.

7.To assist in the development of drugs:

 Within weeks of the outbreak, AI’s predictive capabilities already began proposing existing drugs that might be useful in its cure. Google’s DeepMind division uses its latest AI algorithms to study and understand proteins that make up the virus and are publishing their findings to help in the development of treatments.

8.Identification of non-compliance or infected individuals:

 A team of physicians at the Zhongnan Hospital at Wuhan in China are now using a GPU-accelerated AI software model to detect visual signs of the COVID-19. The model relies on NVIDIA GPUs for both training as well as for inference, and it has managed to help overworked staff screen and prioritize patients that are likely to have the virus. Developed by a Beijing-based startup Infervision, the software detects signs of pneumonia caused by the virus. While the software was primarily used in the detection of cancer in lung CTs, the newly developed model looks more closely at coronavirus pneumonia. Till now the new system has been deployed in over 34 hospitals in China and has successfully reviewed more than 32,000 cases of the coronavirus or Covid 19.

9.Supercomputers to work on coronavirus vaccines: 

Supercomputers of various major tech companies like Tencent, DiDi, and Huawei are being used by researchers for the development of a cure or a vaccine for the virus. The speed these computers is much faster than the standard computer processing and hence can run faster calculations and provide model solutions for necessary situations.