Machines, our health-care consultants
Artificial intelligence tools can help predict and treat global disease crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic
At the end of December 2019 Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) start-up BlueDot picked up a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases near Wuhan in China.A few days later the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) noticed the flare-up.But it wasn’t until January 9 that the World Health Organisation (WHO) notified the world of a new flu-like outbreak in China.In the year 2020 it doesn’t come as a surprise that digital technology can play a critical role in the global effort to stop the spread of a virus. BlueDot uses language processing and machine learning to sift through data from hundreds of thousands of sources. These include information from official public health organisations, digital media, global airline ticketing, livestock health reports and population demographics, the company says.Its machines are trained to process immense amounts of data quicker than we can comprehend.If you’re thinking "Wow, these smart computers are on their way to replace the work of humans",...
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