Here at Vision Semi and My Vision Surplus, we're interested in more than just sales, the technology our equipment enables is also a passion of ours.  In that vein, we'd like to discuss how, according to this article by Vox, AI can help contain the spread of Coronavirus and predict the behaviors of epidemics in the future.  

Artificial Intelligence is already making an impact on how China and the world respond to the Coronavirus scare.  AI is using data about flight patterns to analyze possible routes of contamination, and figure where it might pop up next.

The first waves of information came from BlueDot, a company in Canada that uses machine learning to read hundreds of thousands of articles a day and relays this information to disease-control groups on the ground, alerting them right away. BlueDot has also been able to correlate travel patterns and warn ahead of time which cities would be affected. 

Other companies like Metabiota have been able to predict other countries at a high risk of contamination ahead of the first signs, and have taken this analysis further to possibly predict the potential for social and political unrest related to an illness' spread.  AI is quickly becoming vastly important to governments and public health officials by determining where to send preparedness resources, supplies, and educate the public, allowing them to better-utilize already scarce funding. Check another plus in the column for AI. 

AI is not without its faults and has shown a history of bias since it can only be as good as the information it's presented with- data that is undoubtedly skewed by the complexities of human authors. 

 

Main Picutre is an MGN Image. All credits to https://new.mgnonline.com/

January 29, 2020 — Carrie Green

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