This archive report was first published on 20 August 2020.
AI in the Fight Against COVID-19 ¶
As the world grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of AI companies worldwide joined the effort to combat the crisis. From detecting the virus to developing treatments and vaccines, AI has proven to be a vital tool in the fight against COVID-19.
According to various US universities, the role of AI in the current crisis can be broken down into three intermediate stages: finding treatments by analyzing large amounts of data, reducing the spread of COVID-19, and treating ill patients.
Healthcare workers have also been aided by the latest technologies, with AI-powered tools helping to show COVID-19 cases through hotspots and enabling digital symptoms of the disease.
AI has been deeply involved in all sectors, from detection and research to healthcare, data analysis, symptoms, and forecasting. In this article, we'll explore how AI has helped researchers and scientists in their fight against COVID-19.
AI Tools ¶
AI tools, such as natural language processing, have helped biomedical researchers and clinicians find the COVID-19 vaccine. Although these tools are still underdeveloped, researchers remain hopeful that AI will play a crucial role in the pandemic.
Machine Learning, a subset of Artificial Intelligence, has also played a major role in supporting the global community by enabling face-to-face interactions during lockdown and improving virtual business communications through video conferencing.
Detection of Coronavirus Outbreak through AI ¶
BlueDot, a Canadian start-up, raised the red flag on the novel coronavirus pandemic using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP). They analyzed online reports, travel records, government records, and health records four times an hour, spotting unusual pneumonia in Wuhan, China on December 30, 2019, nine days before the World Health Organisation.
By accessing AI data, they predicted COVID-19 cases in 11 cities worldwide and raised alarms to detect the outbreak of the disease. The question remains: how did AI manage this huge data?
Big Data Analysis of AI ¶
AI and ML have the capability to hold and correlate big data into meaningful information. Analytics played a crucial part in understanding the spread of COVID-19, which originated from an animal to human transmission in an exotic animal market. Scientists and researchers discovered population migration, population breakups, health reports, and travel patterns using Artificial Intelligence.
How AI Studied the Spread and Tracked COVID-19? ¶
MIT developed an ML model to track and spread the virus, helping to measure its spread and decide lockdowns and their tenure. Researchers partnered with Amazon Web Services to study undetected infections, their spread, and mutants. AI-driven projects also involved Amazon Web Services (AWS) to study infected patients.
The University of British Columbia Researchers used AWS to study the work of diseases by building an open-source AI model, planning to use lung scans of COVID-19 patients to understand the response and extent of infection.
How AI Became Part of the Solution? ¶
AI has also helped in discovering the drug and vaccine of COVID-19, involving laboratory equipment and scientists in research work. ML models are used to identify effective components and understand protein structures. AWS partnered with LifeBit to conduct more holistic research by gaining access to genomic data, identifying potential drugs and protein families to develop the vaccine.
