On December. 31, BlueDot, a Toronto-based Company that uses artificial intelligence to track the spread of infection diseases, alerted it's customers about a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China. Nine days later, the World Health Organization confirmed the discovery of a novel Coronavirus, later named COVID-19, in Wuhan.
Today, COVID-19 is a pandemic that has spread to 180 countries, claimed more than 83,000 lives, and Triggered a near global lockdown. And for the moment, the best solution to contain the spread of the virus is to improve personal hygiene and exercise social distancing.
In the meantime, politicians, scientist, and researchers are teaming up to find systematic ways to fight the virus and care for patients. And they'r getting some much-needed help from artificial intelligence.
Bengaluru: Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping doctors, researchers and government fight the COVID-19 pandemic, technology giants said while discussing solutions for the highly contagious disease during a webinar organized by Bennett University.
"The COVID-19 pandemic is the most important disruption of our time. It has prompted nations, individual and organisations to adopt digital in a big way to survive, scale, and succeed. It is helping navigate the pandemic," said Sandip Patel, Managing Director of India at IBM.
The theme of the global webinar, organised by the Department of Computer Science Engineering of BU on Monday, was 'AI Solutions for COVID-19'.
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) tied up with IBM earlier in the month to use its AI-based tool Watson Assistant to respond to specific COVID-19 queries of frontline workers and data entry operator.
Patel said that IBM's technology solutions can be used for strengthening IT operations, streamline IT recovery, and immunize organisation from disruption, empower workflows and productivity.
Manish Gupta, Director of Google Research India, said the company was harnessing the predictive information it has in helping migrant workers. It could be in identifying food camps and night shelters on Google Map, extending it in search, and enabling voice assistants so that people can make voice queries.
Google also has enabled it on KaiOS, the operating system that runs on feature phones of Reliance Jio, not just smartphones.
In India, where cardiovascular diseases are higher, Gupta said Google was looking at AI and technology based interventions through proper monitoring and to delay the onset by as much as 10-15 years or even prevent it.
"We are working on applying AI to gather all the health signals in a privacy preserving manner and building these risk models and allowing a health companion to find timely intervention, lifestyle and clinical interventions,"he said.
Vishal Dhupar, MD, NVIDIA, South Asia that technology solutions are helping doctors treat patients and robots deliver drugs.
"At NVIDIA, we are working to push the boundaries of technology to do more in the time to come -whether it's supercharging the analysis of genomes, better at discovering infections, or creating safer working environments for frontline forces,"he said. "Use Supercomputer/AI to fight the next pandemic".
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