10 Ways AI is leading the fight against COVID-19

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, innovators, high tech companies, startups and researchers have turned to artificial intelligence to find solutions to fight the virus.

by Andrew Quixley AI Specialist and former IBM executive

AI SPECIALIST and former IBM executive Andrew Quixley opines the technology, along with high performance computing (HPC), is one of the most potent weapons in our arsenal as the world combats the corona virus.

Here are 10 ways Quixley believes AI is leading the fight against COVID-19.

Outbreak identification

Early awareness of a communicable disease outbreak is critical to the efforts to stop it before it really gets established. But who knew that a small handful of flu-like cases emanating from somewhere in China in December were actually the faint signals of something much larger looming?

The answer is Kamran Khan, founder and CEO of BlueDot. Khan’s algorithm is trained to look for disease epidemics. It uses AI’s power to make sense of unstructured information, scanning foreign language news sources for anomalies that signal an outbreak, and using global airline ticketing data to predict where the outbreak will go next.

According to this report from CNBC, BlueDot was able to infer a disease outbreak in Wuhan and warn its clients on 31 December, fully six days before the US Center for Disease Control and nine days before the World Health Organisation.

Tracking and predicting the spread of the disease

A major disease outbreak is a highly complex system of systems with potentially trillions of moving parts and millions of variables. Figuring out which of the variables are the main deterministic factors and measuring their likely impact in such a complex system requires immense computing resources. Think multivariate analysis on steroids, on steroids.

Machine Learning is particularly suited to modelling such complex scenarios to produce algorithms that are a virtual reflection of reality. The algorithms can be used to predict outcomes when the variables change. Arguably, only machinelearning can do this, and its importance in the toolkit for epidemiology cannot be overstated.

Tracing people who could be infected

The early containment stage for COVID-19 involves meticulously tracing anyone who might have been in contact with an infected person, or been in the vicinity of the pathogen, and isolating them.

According to this report from Reuters, China’s exceptional advances in state-wide surveillance technology and their national database of faces enabled them to track one individual from Hangzhou, first through Automated Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) and later through Automated Facial Recognition (AFR), when he breached his own self-isolation before the end of the two weeks.

Was this a proportionate and ethical use of AI-powered facial recognition? No doubt this man’s neighbours would have a point of view.

Communicating with citizens

The first infrastructure casualty in a major outbreak will be the government helplines. The same day that the first case is confirmed in any country, the public and private health call centres are likely to be swamped with calls from anxious citizens. Even countries with highly developed healthcare infrastructure are vulnerable to overload, as evidenced with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) helpline, NHS 111.

No human-only contact centre can scale its capacity by 10, 100 or 1,000 times overnight. Even if there were hundreds or thousands of volunteers available, and enough lines, desks and headsets, there isn’t enough time to train the agents to give the right answers every time.

AI-powered textbots and talkbots can take the strain, by answering the commonly-asked questions at any time of the day or night, giving totally consistent answers every time, and are able scale up to cope with extreme peak workloads.

Finding an effective treatment

AI’s Deep Learning power enables pharmaceutical researchers to predict the characteristics of new chemical compounds that don’t exist yet, running down the maths for hundreds of thousands of possible permutations in just hours and reducing the lead time to ‘invent’ a new drug by orders of magnitude. It can also be used to predict which existing molecules might be effective against the new disease.

Pharmaceutical Technology reported that leading AI-technology provider Iktos and research centre SRI International ‘will combine [the Iktos] generative modelling technology with SRI’s fully automated synthetic chemistry platform ... to design compounds and speed-up the identification of drug candidates’ to tackle COVID-19.

There are already successful precedents. In the last two weeks, researchers from MIT published this paper in Cell describing how they used AI to discover a powerful new antibiotic––named Halicin––capable of killing some of the world’s nastiest pathogens.

Earlier in February, European Pharmaceutical Review reported that two companies had an AI-discovered new drug––DSP1181, expected to be indicated for the treatment of OCD––which is starting Phase 1 clinical trials.

Triaging new cases

The waiting room at the hospital or the doctor’s surgery/office/ rooms is the last place anyone wants to be during a pandemic. Moreover, if the prevalence of cases becomes very high, there will be too many new patients to triage for the numbers of clinicians available.

AI can help to scale up the capacity and allow people to get a first diagnosis without visiting a waiting room. AI-powered symptom checker chatbots are already in use, like this example Symptomate: https://symptomate.com/chatbot/

I tested Symptomate and was impressed by its detailed questions. I responded as if I was a COVID-19 sufferer, but I may not have got the symptoms quite right. This is the output––with sincere thanks and/or apologies to Symptomate for being my sandpit today.

Obviously novel coronavirus is a new pathogen that was unknown to science until very recently, so symptom-checkers need to be updated for the new disease. The Wall Street Journal has reported that there have been challenges in doing this, but there’s no reason to believe that the challenges are insurmountable.

Enforcing the quarantine

AI-powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or smart drones are commonly used to access areas that are hard-to-reach or dangerous, such as power lines and cell towers. Smart survey drones are now being re-tooled in China to police quarantined areas from above, to perform decontamination protocols and to deliver lightweight essential supplies. This report in the South China Morning Post describes the initiative in detail.

Delivering essential supplies on the ground

Consider the plight of any bus or taxi drivers during a pandemic. They could spend their entire workday in a closed space with strangers, not knowing whether their passengers are carrying the virus or not. Unsurprisingly, the mobility sector is already a casualty of the lockdown in Wuhan, but driverless vehicles have taken over humans are prohibited.

As this report from World Economic Forum describes, driverless logistics vehicles are re-supplying hospitals in infected areas while autonomous robots are now delivering meals within hospitals for more than 40 Chinese cities.

Eliminating fake news

Fake news about coronavirus has been spreading faster than the virus itself, and there’s no shortage of it, according to this report from UK’s bbc.com. Zany memes aren’t the issue––the problem is fake material that purports to be real and is capable of causing harm, such as advising people to drink bleach to cure COVID-19.

AI is being used to flag fake news by learning which web sites are more authoritative, identifying posts that use sensational language or images that don’t fit with the right date and location for the ‘story’ they support, and which posts are most likely to be coming from bots. Scott Tong explores the detail in this article on Marketplace.

Managing complex supply chains

Empty shelves are a familiar sight in any country that has the virus, but panic-buying of hand sanitiser is only the tip of iceberg, right down at the consumer end.

If we follow those supply chains that originate in China––and many do––upstream to their source, COVID-19 is proving to be a wrecking ball, preventing workers even getting to work to make the stuff that makes the stuff that makes the stuff. The economic impact is already colossal.

Supply chains––like disease epidemics––are complex systems of systems, and they’ve been a great proving ground in recent years for AI’s power to optimise outcomes by analysing the impact of many variable factors. Mark Balte’s article in the European Business Review illustrates the extraordinary degree to which AI is now intrinsic in the SCP domain. Rebooting global supply chains and getting back to ‘normal’ will be impossible without it.

AI is the ace in our hand

Humankind is generally at its best when confronted by the need for urgency and an existential threat. COVID-19 brings us both. In the weeks ahead, the greatest minds will come up with something new. It’s what we’ve always done in the past, only this time we will have AI to extend the limits of our brainpower as never before. ai