ON NEW YEAR’S Eve of last year, the artificial intelligence platform BlueDot picked up an anomaly. It registered a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China. BlueDot, based in Toronto, Canada, uses natural language processing and machine learning to track, locate, and report on infectious disease spread. It sends out its alerts to a variety of clients, including health care, government, business, and public health bodies. It had spotted what would come to be known as Covid-19, nine days before the World Health Organization released its statement alerting people to the emergence of a novel coronavirus.
BlueDot’s role in spotting the outbreak was an early example of AI intervention. Artificial intelligence has already played a useful but fragmented role in many aspects of the global fight against the coronavirus. In the past months, AI has been used for prediction, screening, contact alerts, faster diagnosis, automated deliveries, and laboratory drug discovery.
As the pandemic has rolled around the planet, innovative applications of AI have cropped up in many different locations. In South Korea, location-based messaging has been a crucial tool in the battle to reduce the transmission of the disease. Nine out of 10 South Koreans have been getting location-based emergency messages that alert them when they are near a confirmed case.
In China, Alibaba announced an AI algorithm that it says can diagnose suspected cases within 20 seconds (almost 45 times faster than human detection) with 96 percent accuracy. Autonomous vehicles were quickly put to use in scenarios that would have been too dangerous for humans. Robots in China’s Hubei and Guangdong provinces delivered food, medicine, and goods to patients in hospitals or quarantined families, many of whom had lost household breadwinners to the virus. In California, computer scientists are working on systems that can remotely monitor the health of the elderly in their homes and provide alerts if they fall ill with Covid-19 or other conditions.