By Rysha Sultania
The world is exceedingly dynamic, with new topics trending every hour. However, in recent times it has become an interesting observation that two genres never seem to get exhausted on their content matter. These talks of the town are none other than Technology and the Corona Virus. Of course, when we say technology, it has become synonymous with the magic that is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). This blessing has become increasingly overworked in furthering any progress against the fight with the Evil Pandemic. Tech companies and software giants are globally accelerating their innovative outputs in the industry that can be imperative to grapple with the current health crisis.
Firstly due to some of the stringent measures of quarantine and travel bans in many countries, the work environment has forced to become completely online, resulting in a growing need for interactive, efficient and effective platforms to collaborate without any physical contact. Of course, like everywhere, technology can come to the rescue here too! ML is playing a pivotal role in healthcare, food security, and telemedicine spheres among others, as is clear in the examples below.
HEALTHCARE- Clevy.io, a French start-up and AWS customer, which has launched a chatbot to make it easier for people to find official government communications about COVID-19. Powered by real-time information from the French government and the World Health Organization, the chatbot assesses known symptoms and answers questions about government policies. With almost 3 million messages sent to-date, this chatbot is able to answer questions on everything from exercise to an evaluation of COVID-19 risks, without further straining the resources of healthcare and government
institutions. French cities including Strasbourg, Orléans and Nanterre are using the chatbot to decentralize the distribution of accurate, verified information.(1)
FOOD SECURITY- To avoid any disruption to the food supply chain, food processors and governments need to understand the current state of agriculture. Agri-tech start-up Mantle Labs, another AWS customer, is offering its cutting-edge AI-driven crop-monitoring solution to retailers free of charge for a period of three months to provide additional resiliency and certainty to supply chains in the UK. The technology works to assess satellite images of crops to flag potential issues to farmers and retailers early on so they can better manage supply, procurement and inventory planning. The platform deploys custom machine learning models to mix imagery from multiple satellites, enabling a near real-time assessment of agricultural conditions.(2)
Other than through these directly involved projects, AI is also helping play the role of an excellent aid to understanding how the disease spreads and can be contained as well. It is allowing data scientists and statisticians make calculated predictions and informed decisions about vulnerable areas, future pandemics and create warning systems against the same.
At the beginning of this pandemic, Blue Dot(3), a Canadian start-up and AWS customer that uses AI to detect disease outbreaks, was one of the first to raise the alarm about a worrisome outbreak of a respiratory illness in Wuhan, China. BlueDot uses AI to detect disease outbreaks. Using their machine learning algorithms, BlueDot sifts through news reports in 65 languages, along with airline data and animal disease networks to detect outbreaks and anticipate the dispersion of disease. Epidemiologists then review those results and verify that the conclusions make sense from a scientific standpoint. BlueDot provides those insights to public health officials, airlines and hospitals to help them anticipate and better manage risks.
These are just few of the ways AI has been and can help tackle the global issue at hand. AI is only limited by the imagination of the human mind and with our brain, the sky is the limit! So get out there and save the world from mass destruction. The world needs you, our A+ coders!
Sources-
Examples (1), (2), (3) and extra info about them cited from-
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/05/how-ai-and-machine-learning-are-helping-to-fight-covid-
19/
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