COVID-19 SPECIAL EDITION

Spotlight on Covid-19 and the role of the AI Community in fighting the pandemic

WHY SPECIAL EDITION?

While we write this newsletter, countries throughout the world are introducing travel restrictions, issuing “shelter in place” orders and closing schools. International organizations like WHO, UN and many governments are on an emergency mission of fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. We are immensely grateful to doctors, nurses and all medical staff who are on the first line of response to this crisis and we praise their efforts to keep us all safe while putting themselves at risk. With over 197,000 confirmed cases and over 7,900 deaths worldwide, the global health community needs all assistance possible.

With this newsletter we shed a light to efforts in the AI domain and possibilities of AI related technologies to offer that assistance in containing the outbreak. We see this as a potentially critical moment in human history when new research plays an important part in shaping the global response to an acute disease threat. All responses, including the AI ones, will have a decisive influence in what is now both political and health crisis. How we respond to this crisis will influence our path towards a peaceful, sustainable and healthier future.

CALL TO ACTION TO AI EXPERT COMMUNITY

US OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY - CALL TO ACTION to the Tech Community on New Machine Readable COVID-19 Dataset

Today, researchers and leaders from the Allen Institute for AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Microsoft, and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) of scholarly literature about COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and the Coronavirus group. The White House joins these institutions in issuing a call to action to the Nation’s artificial intelligence experts to develop new text and data mining techniques that can help the science community answer high-priority scientific questions related to COVID-19.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION - Applications welcome from startups and SMEs with innovative solutions to tackle Coronavirus outbreak

The European Commission is calling for startups and SMEs with technologies and innovations that could help in treating, testing, monitoring or other aspects of the Coronavirus outbreak to apply urgently to the next round of funding from the European Innovation Council. The deadline for applications to the EIC Accelerator is 17:00 on Wednesday 18 March (Brussels local time).

OMDENA CHALLENGE - Coronavirus: Using AI to Understand the Repercussions of Stringent Policies on the Economy and Human Lives during Pandemics

In this Omdena Challenge, 50 AI experts and aspiring data scientists from around the world will apply AI to enable governments to design data-driven policies to deal effectively with pandemics like the Coronavirus. The Challenge starts at March 26th. You can also join as a funding, technology, or media partner, contact Omdena here.

Mechanical Ventilator (A.K.A Pandemic Ventilator), assembled from off the shelf parts

Non-FDA approved. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Use it at your own risk. For educational purposes only. With primarily cars’ and trucks’ parts bought on Amazon or in local shops, it was assembled for only $400.

ARTICLES WE RECOMMEND  

Scientists Crunch Data to Predict How Many People Will Get Coronavirus

Epidemiologists are teaming up with data scientists to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus by tapping big data, machine learning and other digital tools. The goal is to get real-time forecasts and other critical information to front-line health-care workers and public policy makers as the outbreak unfolds. Known as outbreak analytics, the approach attempts to go beyond confirmed cases and fatalities to gauge the total number of people who are likely to be infected by a virus—whether or not they show any symptoms.

DeepMind’s Protein Folding AI Is Going After Coronavirus

In very broad strokes, AI could be enormously helpful for initial drug discovery in two main ways: one, screening through millions of chemical compounds for potential drugs in simulation tests, far faster than any human expert; two, identifying targets that new drugs can latch onto, either to reduce their impact (making people less sick), or to slow their spread among people. For COVID-19, DeepMind is focusing on the second route. Known mostly for its algorithms that beat human players at Go, DOTA, and other games, DeepMind has nevertheless been working directly on solutions for drug discovery. Their secret sauce? AlphaFold, a deep learning system that tries to predict protein structures accurately when no similar proteins exist.

Coronavirus Researchers Are Using High-Tech Methods to Predict Where the Virus Might Go Next

As the deadly 2019-nCov coronavirus spreads, raising fears of a worldwide pandemic, researchers and startups are using artificial intelligence and other technologies to predict where the virus might appear next — and even potentially sound the alarm before other new, potentially threatening viruses become public health crises. The enormous amounts of data they collect on viruses worldwide could also be used to train AI algorithms to predict which viruses in animals are more likely to be transferred to human populations.

An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus

BlueDot uses an AI-driven algorithm that scours foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and official proclamations to give its clients advance warning to avoid danger zones like Wuhan. Speed matters during an outbreak, and tight-lipped Chinese officials do not have a good track record of sharing information about diseases, air pollution, or natural disasters. But public health officials at WHO and the CDC have to rely on these very same health officials for their own disease monitoring. So maybe an AI can get there faster.

AI-Powered Smartphone App Offers Coronavirus Risk Assessment – Coming Soon

A smartphone app coupled with artificial intelligence and machine intelligence will increase access to at-home COVID-19 risk assessments, which will help provide health officials with real-time information to better target potential COVID-19 patients, according to experts from the Medical College of Georgia. Rao and co-author Jose Vazquez MD, chief of the MCG division of infectious diseases, are currently working with developers to finalize the app. It will be free and is expected to be public within a few weeks.

Phones Could Track the Spread of Covid-19. Is It a Good Idea?

Inspired by the way China and South Korea apparently used smartphones to slow the spread of Covid-19, some US technologists have begun working on tracking apps. An open source project called CoEpi sprang up in February to develop an app with similar functionality to FluPhone. Ramesh Raskar, a professor at the MIT Media Lab, and colleagues are developing an app that would let people log their movements and compare them with those of known coronavirus patients, using redacted data supplied by the state or national public health departments. Over time, users would be asked whether they are infected, providing a way to identify potential transmissions in a similar way to FluPhone. The team released a prototype for testing on Friday.

Surveillance Company Says It's Deploying 'Coronavirus-Detecting' Cameras in US

Athena Security previously sold a system that it claims can detect weapons in video feeds. Now it says it's applying a similar approach to spotting fevers. An Austin, Texas based technology company is launching "artificially intelligent thermal cameras" that it claims will be able to detect fevers in people, and in turn send an alert that they may be carrying the coronavirus. Civil liberties experts have warned that while new surveillance technologies could have some use during the pandemic, the emergency must not be used as an excuse to infringe on basic civil liberties.

How Artificial Intelligence is Aiding the Fight Against Coronavirus

New technologies are constantly enabling doctors and scientists to improve the ways they prevent, diagnose, and treat disease. AI is one such technology, and though it has its limits, it plays a vital role in allowing health experts to take full advantage of the vast amounts of data at their disposal, making accurate predictions and saving precious time in a crisis. Investments in AI and data science create important tools these experts need when faced with unexpected situations like the coronavirus pandemic.

PODCASTS WE RECOMMEND   

THE ARTIFICIAL PODCAST: Coronavirus – An Outbreak in the Age of Technology

In this week’s episode of The Artificial Podcast, Nick and Brett talk about the new Coronavirus that is responsible for causing COVID-19 that has infected over 100,000 people around the world since December of last year. Due to a large amount of media hype and misinformation that has produced mass hysteria around the world in recent weeks, Nick and Brett focus on sharing only the facts to help educate everyone about what coronaviruses are, how they work, how the COVID-19 outbreak began, and the symptoms and illness associated with the new disease. Nick and Brett also discuss how the COVID-19 outbreak is the first global viral outbreak to occur in the age of technology and share some different examples of how new and emerging technologies like AI and IoT have helped to combat and mitigate the spread of the virus.

TALENT TRANSFORMATION GUILD - Experts turning to AI in the battle to combat the Coronavirus

The Talent Transformation Guild provides a fascinating insight into how AI, robotics and automation will change our working environment. As well as increasing the efficiency of organizations, AI is helping us in the fight against coronavirus. As fears over the Covid-19 coronavirus continue to grow, scientists are turning to artificial intelligence to help them understand more and combat it at every level.

TECHNOLOGY BY DESIGN - Reporting on corona virus from inside quarantine

Matt Perault talked with Shan Li, reporter for the Wall Street Journal, based in Beijing, about the benefits and pitfalls of online expression in the midst of a public health crisis. How do you report on an outbreak in a country so concerned with censorship? And what was it like to be in America’s first mandatory quarantine since the smallpox outbreak in the 1960s?

SPOTLIGHT ON AI TOOLS AND VISUALIZATIONS TACKLING THE CRISIS

Corona Virus Resource Center – by Johns Hopkins University

The map was first shared publicly on Jan. 22. It was developed to provide researchers, public health authorities, and the general public with a user-friendly tool to track the outbreak as it unfolds. All data collected and displayed are made freely available through a GitHub repository, along with the feature layers of the dashboard, which are now included in the ESRI Living Atlas.

HEALTHMAP – by Boston’s Children Hospital  

Healthmap is a tool which scrapes information about new outbreaks from online news reports, chatrooms and more. Healthmap then organizes that previously disparate data, generating visualizations that show how and where communicable diseases like the coronavirus are spreading. Healthmap’s output supplements more traditional data-gathering techniques used by organizations like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). The project’s data is being used by clinicians, researchers and governments.

BlueDot - automated infectious disease surveillance

BlueDot, a Toronto-based health surveillance company launched in 2014, gathers disease data from myriad online sources, then uses airline flight information to make predictions about where infectious diseases may appear next (air routes, after all, are a common disease vector). This sort of predictive technology is essential both for other companies, like airlines, and for healthcare workers in hospitals, who may be the first to interact with potentially infectious patients.

The Global Virome Project

This project intends to develop a genetic and ecological database of the vast majority of viruses in animal populations that have the potential to infect humans. Some scientists argue that mapping the human virome (the broad group of viruses that infect humans or live inside our bodies) is a “key priority” in health research.

Infervision – detecting lung problems on CT scans

In order to effectively track the spread of a disease, hospitals need to be able to accurately test for it. To accomplish this, two Chinese companies have developed AI-enabled software to diagnose coronavirus. Beijing-based startup Infervision trained its software to detect lung problems on CT scans. Originally used to diagnose lung cancer, it can also detect pneumonia associated with respiratory illnesses like coronavirus. At least 34 Chinese hospitals have used the technology to help them review 32,000 suspected cases.

DAMO Academy – the research arm of Chinese company Alibaba

trained an AI system to recognize coronavirus with up to 96 percent accuracy. The system can evaluate the 300 to 400 CT scans it takes to diagnose coronavirus in 20 to 30 seconds, much faster than the 10 to 15 minutes it would take a doctor to go through the same number of scans. This frees up doctors, who struggle with limited time and resources on the front lines of the ongoing pandemic, to focus on more important tasks. So far DAMO’s system has helped at least 26 Chinese hospitals review over 30,000 cases.

RESOURCES TO FOLLOW 

MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW - Coronavirus Tech Report

MIT Technology Review's newsletter dedicated to helping you navigate and understand the impacts of Covid-19 on today's world. No sector of the economy has been untouched—and that obviously includes technology and innovation. Many are already hoping new emerging tools could provide us with solutions that treat and potentially cure infected patients, stop the spread of the virus, and make it easier for us to adjust new conditions for the time being. Of course, technology can also be a disruptive and threatening force on its own - disinformation about the virus is spreading, the crisis is stoking fears about breaches in privacy, and mistakes in even the simplest tools are slowing down our efforts to stop the virus. From tips about how the virus survives in the wild to updates on the reach for a vaccine, we're hard at work digging for valuable context and information you can count on.

AI ETHICS WEEKLY – March 13: Coronavirus Special Issue – Hope is not a strategy

The lack of leadership by public institutions and governments on the spread of disease from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has led to open season on facts, especially on social media. To combat the misinformation and rampant speculation, LightHouse3 curated the most credible sources on this global public health crisis.

EVENTS TO FOLLOW 

• COVID-19 AND AI: A Virtual Conference, April 1, 2020, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, RSVP
• Science Matters: Let's Talk About COVID-19, by Imperial College London on Coursera

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