The Effects of AI in Prevention of Future Pandemics

Akhtar Et Al developed a dynamic neural network to detect and predict the spread of the Zika-virus in 2015. The algorithm used in that network needs to be re-trained with data for COVID-19 in order to make predictions for COVID-19 and this will be the case for any algorithm developed currently when it gets used for a future pandemic. Unfortunately, this brings up a challenge as it’s hard to find and collect unbiased data to train these models. Also, many believe some governments lie about their COVID-19 numbers, which makes it hard to differentiate between real data and fake data. In AI training for a global pandemic, big data is often collected through social media and as the pandemic grows so does the buzz about it. This buzz results in much more noise in data which is unrequired or fake information. There have been attempts to battle this noise but that also involves AI so it shows how AI is such a versatile thing that can be used to solve AI problems.

The financial crisis of 2008 kick-started the cloud computing revolution and the current COVID-19 crisis could have a similar effect on AI applications. The usage of AI technologies has increased significantly in the medical sector for things such as discovering new drugs, finding a vaccine or treatment for the current pandemic. There is also Google's DeepMind which uses AI to predict the structure of the proteins of the virus information that could be useful in developing new drugs. The time required for processes like identifying potential drug candidates has been reduced enormously due to the use of AI.

References:

Naudé, W. (2020). Artificial Intelligence Against Covid-19: An Early Review. Retrieved 3 June 2020, from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3568314

Fan, S. (2020). DeepMind’s Protein Folding AI Is Going After Coronavirus. Retrieved 3 June 2020, from https://singularityhub.com/2020/03/17/how-deepminds-ai-is-working-to-decode-coronavirus/

Grossman, G. (2020). After coronavirus, AI could be central to our new normal.

Retrieved 29 May 2020, from https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/08/after-coronavirus-ai-could-be-central-to-our-new-normal/