Artificial Intelligence Emerges as an Imperative Tool During the Contagious Covid-19 Outbreak
Published on : Monday 30-03-2020
For the last few weeks, the world has been heavily disrupted by the outbreak of coronavirus, which has hit hard the global economy. This has largely led to both governments and businesses of all sizes across diverse industries to discover and integrate innovative strategies to fight against the virus. This is where Artificial Intelligence comes into the rescue, delivering a key role than ever before in areas, such as diagnosing risk, doubt-clearing, delivering services, drug discovery, and more.
Countries like the US, South Korea and Taiwan are already using AI to ease the spread of contagious Covid-19. The technology has the potential to stimulate the development of testing kits and treatments in order to track the spread of the virus, as well as provide citizens with real-time information. Last month, a WHO report said AI and big data were a key part of China's response to the virus.
In South Korea, the government enlisted the private sector to roll out the development of coronavirus testing kits after reports of a new virus began to emerge from China. In this regard, Seoul-based molecular biotech company Seegene utilized AI to accelerate the development of testing kits. This enables the company to submit its solution to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) three weeks after scientists started working on it. According to reports, the approval process for new medical equipment, such as testing kits, generally takes 18 months, but the KCDC, part of the South Korean Ministry of Welfare and Health, fast-tracked the process and gave approval of the tests in just one week.
China also uses AI to expedite scientific processes. In the country, scientists recreated the genome sequence of Covid-19 in a month, powered by AI. In contrary to this, it took scientists several months to reconstruct the genome sequence of the SARS virus, using more traditional techniques, back in 2003.
Besides governments, private companies also have come forward in the fight against this global crisis. Social network giant Facebook, for instance, is already working in collaboration with researchers at Harvard University's School of Public Health and the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, sharing anonymized data about people's movements and high-resolution population density maps that assist them to predict the spread of the virus. The company is also helping partners to realize how people are talking about the issue online, by using tools such as Crowdtangle, which aggregate social-media posts.
On the other hand, CoRover, an AI-driven startup that has earlier created chatbots for the railways ticketing platform, has now developed a video-bot in conjunction with a doctor from Fortis Healthcare. Through this platform, a doctor from the hospital will take questions from people regarding Covid-19.
Moreover, earlier this year, a British-based startup Exscienta became the first company to put an AI-designed drug molecule to human trials. It took just 12 months for algorithms to develop it, compared with four to five years for traditional research. According to the company’s chief executive officer Prof Andrew Hopkins, AI could be used in three ways in the current crisis, rapidly developing antibodies and vaccines for the Covid-19 virus; scanning through existing drugs to see if any could be repurposed; and designing a drug to fight both the current and future coronavirus outbreaks.
So, as tech companies are more integrally involved with healthcare professionals, academics, and government entities worldwide in a global pandemic, AI is more used to manage and fight against the Covid-19.