3 AI and data science applications that can help dealing with COVID-19

All industries already feel the impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic on the economy. As many businesses had to shut down and either switch to telework or let go of their entire staff, there is no doubt that it will take a long time for the world to recover from this crisis.

Current prospects on the growth of the global economy, shared by different sources, support the idea of the long and painful recovery of the global economy from the COVID-19 crisis.
Statista, for example, compares the initial GDP growth prognosis for 2020 and the prognosis based on the impact of the novel coronavirus on the GPD growth, estimating the difference of as much as 0.5%.

The last time that global GDP experienced such a decline was back in 2008 when the global economic crisis affected every industry with no exceptions.

In the situation with the current pandemic, we also see that different industries change their growth prognoses.
The IT industry, for instance, the expected spending growth in 2020 doesn’t even exceed the pessimistic scenario related to the coronavirus pandemic, and is even expected to shrink.

It would be foolish to claim that the negative effect of the COVID-19 crisis can be reversed. It is already our reality that many businesses and industries around the world will suffer during the current global economic crisis.
Governments around the world responded to this crisis by helping businesses not go bankrupt with state financial support. However, this support is only expected to have a short-term effect and will hardly mitigate the final effect of the global economic crisis on businesses around the world.

So, in search of solutions to decrease the negative effect of drowning global economics, the world, among all other sources, will likely turn to the help of technology, just as the entire world did when it was forced to work from home.

In this article, we offer our stance on how AI and data scientists, in particular, can help respond to the COVID-19 crisis and help relieve its negative effect.

1. Data science and healthcare system

The biggest negative effect on the global economy can come from failing healthcare systems. It was the reason why governments around the world ordered citizens to stay at home and self-isolate, as, in many cases, the course of the COVID-19 disease can be asymptomatic.

Is increasing investment in the healthcare system a bad thing altogether?

No, if we are talking about healthcare systems at a local level, like a state or a province. “At a local level, increasing investments in the healthcare system increases the demand for related products and equipment in direct ratio,” says Dorian Martin, a researcher at WowGrade.

However, in case local governments run out of money in their emergency budgets, they might have to ask the state government for financial support.

This scenario could become our reality if the number of infected people rapidly increases, with hospitals potentially running out of equipment, beds, and, most critically, staff.

What can data science do to help manage this crisis?

UK’s NHS healthcare data storage

Some countries are already preparing for the scenario described above with the help of data scientists.
For instance, the UK government ordered NHS England to develop a data store that would combine multiple data sources and make them deliver information to one secure cloud storage.
What will this data include?

This cloud storage will help NHS healthcare workers access information on the movement of the critical staff, the availability of hospital beds and equipment.

Apart from that, this data storage will help the government to get a comprehensive and accurate view of the current situation to detect anomalies, and make timely decisions based on real data received from hospitals and NHS partner organizations.

Thus, the UK government and NHS are looking into data science to create a system that will help the country tackle the crisis consistently, and manage the supply and demand for critical hospital equipment needed to fight the pandemic.

2. AI’s part in creating the COVID-19 vaccine

Another critical factor that has an effect on the current global economic crisis is the COVID-19 vaccine. It has already become clear that the world is in the standby mode until scientists develop a vaccine that will return people to their normal lives.

It’s a simple cause-and-effect relationship: both global economy and local economies depend on consistent production, production depends on open and functioning production facilities, which depend on workers, who, in their turn, depend on the vaccine to be able to return to work.

And while we still have over a year before the COVID-19 vaccine becomes available to the wide public, scientists turn to AI to speed up the process.

How can AI help develop the COVID-19 vaccine?

• With the help of AI, scientists can analyze the structure of the virus and how it attaches itself to human cells, i.e., its behavior. This data helps researchers build the foundation for vaccine development.
• AI and data science become part of the vaccine development process, as they help scientists analyze thousands of research papers on the matter to make their approach to the vaccine more precise.

An important part of developing a vaccine is analyzing and understanding the protein of the virus and its genetic sequence. In January 2020, Google DeepMind launched a system that builds the virus’s protein in the 3D mode, AlphaFold. This invention already helped the U.S. scientists study the virus enough to create a trial vaccine and launch clinical trials this week.

However, scientists are looking into the ways, how AI can not only be involved in gathering information, but also in the very process of creating a vaccine.

There have already been cases of drugs successfully created by AI. The British startup Excienta created its first drug with the help of artificial intelligence algorithms. The drug is currently undergoing clinical trials. But it will take this drug only 12 months to be ready, compared to 5 years that it usually takes.

Thus, AI gives the world hope that the long-awaited COVID-19 vaccine will be available to the world faster than it’s currently predicted. Yet, there are still a few problems of artificial intelligence implementation in this process, which are mainly connected to AI being underdeveloped itself.

3. Data science and the fight against misinformation

Another factor, which is mostly related to how people respond to the current crisis, and yet has the most negative effect on the global economy, is panic.

We’ve already seen the effects of the rising panic during the Ebola virus crisis in Africa when local economies suffered from plummeting sectors like tourism and commerce.

In economics, the period between the boom (the rising demand for the product) and the bust (a drop in product availability) is very short. During the current pandemic, we’ve seen quite a few examples of how panic buying led to low supply, which damaged local economies.

How can data scientists tackle the threat of panic?

The answer is already in the question: with data.

One of the reasons why people panic is misinformation. “Our online poll has shown that only 12% of respondents read authoritative COVID-19-related resources, while others mostly relied on word-of-mouth approach,” says Martin Harris, a researcher at Studicus.

Misinformation, unfortunately, happens not only among people but on the government level as well. One of the best examples of it is the U.S. officials promoting a drug against malaria as an effective method to treat COVID-19 patients, when, in fact, the effectiveness of this drug hasn’t been proven yet.

The best solution to treat the virus of panic and misinformation is to accumulate all the information from the authoritative resources on the COVID-19 pandemic to help people observe it not only on the local but on the global level as well.

Data scientists and developers at Boston Children’s Hospital have created such a system, called HealthMap, to help people track COVID-19 pandemic, as well as other disease outbreaks around the world.

Conclusion

While there are already quite a few applications of AI and data science that help us respond to the COVID-19 crisis, this crisis is still in its early stages of development.

As we already can use data science to accumulate important information regarding critical hospital staff and equipment, fight misinformation, and use AI to develop the vaccine, we still might discover new ways of applying AI and data science to help the world respond to the COVID-19 crisis.

Yet, today, we can already say that AI and data science have been of enormous help in fighting the pandemic, giving us hope that we will return to our normal lives as soon as possible.

Author: Estelle Liotard

Source: In Data Labs

Agri-Food Industry Barometer COVID-19 implications

Data science community to battle COVID-19 via Kaggle

A challenge on the data science community site Kaggle is asking great minds to apply machine learning to battle the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

As COVID-19 continues to spread uncontrolled around the world, shops and restaurants have closed their doors, information workers have moved home, other businesses have shut down entirely, and people are social distancing and self-isolating to 'flatten the curve'. It's only been a few weeks, but it feels like forever. If you listen to the scientists, we have a way to go still before we can consider reopening and reconnecting. The worst crisis is yet to come for many areas. Yet, there are glimmers of hope, too.

Among them are the efforts of so many smart minds working on different parts of the problem to track hospital beds, map the spread, research the survivors, develop treatments, create a vaccine, and many other innovations. To help spur the development, researchers from several organizations at the request of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy have released a dataset of machine-readable coronavirus literature for data and text mining, which includes more than 29,000 articles of which more than 13,000 have full text.

The dataset is available to researchers around the world via Google's Kaggle machine learning and data science community, the White House office announced earlier this month, and was made available from researchers and leaders from the Allen Institute for AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Microsoft, and the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.

Together, the White House and the organizations have issued a call to action to the nation's AI experts 'to develop new text and data mining techniques that can help the science community answer high-priority scientific questions related to COVID-19'.

Among those answering the call is data science and AI platform company DataRobot, which announced that it would provide the platform for free to those who want to use it to help with the COVID-19 virus response effort. In collaboration with its cloud partner, AWS (which has also waived its fees), the program offers free access to the DataRobot's automated machine learning and Paxata data preparation technology for those participating in the Kaggle challenge.

DataRobot has brought those 13,000 data sets into the DataRobot platform and performed some initial data preparation, Phil Gurbacki, senior VP of product and customer experience told InformationWeek. Some of the initial projects are looking at risk factors, seasonal factors, and how to identify the origin of transmission, he said. Gurbacki said the time series forecast model capabilities of the DataRobot platform could be particularly useful to data scientists looking to model impacts of the virus.

'Innovation starts with an understanding', Gurbacki said. 'We want to make sure we maximize the amount of time that researchers are spending on innovation rather than wasting time doing something that could be automated for them'.

DataRobot joins many other companies that are offering their platforms for free for a limited period as the world responds to the challenges of the novel coronavirus. GIS and mapping software company Esri is also offering its platform free of charge to those working on fighting the pandemic, particularly governments around the world. It has also built templates and a hub that spotlights notable projects.

Plus, there are several vendors that are offering free trial versions of collaboration software for organizations that are now operating with a remote workforce. Those companies include Microsoft with its Teams collaboration software, Atlassian, Cisco's Webex, Facebook for Workplace, Google Hangouts, Slack, Stack Overflow Teams, Zoho Remotely, and Zoom, among many others.

Author: Jessica Davis

Source Informationweek

Data science plays key role in COVID-19 research through supercomputers

Supercomputers, AI and high-end analytic tools are each playing a key role in the race to find answers, treatments and a cure for the widespread COVID-19.

In the race to flatten the curve of COVID-19, high-profile tech companies are banking on supercomputers. IBM has teamed up with other firms, universities and federal agencies to launch the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium.

This consortium has brought together massive computing power in order to assist researchers working on COVID-19 treatments and potential cures. In total, the 16 systems in the consortium will offer researchers over 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores and 34,000 GPUs and counting.

COVID-19 High performance computing consortium

The consortium aims to give supercomputer access to scientists, medical researchers and government agencies working on the coronavirus crisis. IBM said its powerful Summit supercomputer has already helped researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee screen 8,000 compounds to find those most likely to bind to the main "spike" protein of the coronavirus, rendering it unable to infect host cells.

"They were able to recommend the 77 promising small-molecule drug compounds that could now be experimentally tested," Dario Gil, director of IBM Research, said in a post. "This is the power of accelerating discovery through computation."

In conjunction with IBM, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, NASA, nearly a dozen universities, and several other tech companies and laboratories are all involved.

The work of the consortium offers an unprecedented back end of supercomputer performance that researchers can leverage while using AI to parse through massive databases to get at the precise information they're after, Tim Bajarin, analyst and president of Creative Strategies, said.

Supercomputing powered by sharing big databases

Bajarin said that the world of research is fundamentally done in pockets which creates a lot of insulated, personalized and proprietary big databases.

"It will take incredible cooperation for Big Pharma to share their research data with other companies in an effort to create a cure or a vaccine," Bajarin added.

Gil said IBM is working with consortium partners to evaluate proposals from researchers around the world and will provide access to supercomputing capacity for the projects that can have the most immediate impact.

Many enterprises are coming together to share big data and individual databases with researchers.  

Signals Analytics released a COVID-19 Playbook that offers access to critical market intelligence and trends surrounding potential treatments for COVID-19. The COVID-19 Playbook is available at no cost to researchers looking to monitor vaccines that are in development for the disease and other strains of coronavirus, monitor drugs that are being tested for COVID-19 and as a tool to assess which drugs are being repurposed to help people infected with the virus.

"We've added a very specific COVID-19 offering so researchers don't have to build their own taxonomy or data sources and can use it off the shelf," said Frances Zelazny, chief marketing officer at Signals Analytics.

Eschewing raw computing power for targeted, critical insights

With the rapid spread of the virus and the death count rising, treatment options can't come soon enough. Raw compute power is important, but perhaps equally as crucial is being able to know what to ask and quickly analyze results.

"AI can be a valuable tool for analyzing the behavior and spread of the coronavirus, as well as current research projects and papers that might provide insights into how best to battle COVID-19," Charles King, president of the Pund-IT analysis firm, said.

The COVID-19 consortium includes research requiring complex calculations in& epidemiology and bioinformatics. While the high computing power allows for rapid model testing and large data processing, the predictive analytics have to be proactively applied to health IT.

Dealing with COVID-19 is about predicting for the immediate, imminent future - from beds necessary in ICUs to social distancing timelines. In the long term, Bajarin would like to see analytic and predictive AI used as soon as possible to head off future pandemics.

"We've known about this for quite a while - COVID-19 is a mutation of SARS. Proper trend analysis of medical results going forward could help head off the next great pandemic," Bajarin said.

Author: David Needle

Source: TechTarget

Economic crisis and the need for intelligence

The coronavirus outbreak obviously has a disastrous impact on the world. In the first place it affects the health of people all around the world, but it also has major economic implications. In uncertain economic times like this, the need for intelligence is high. This article tells you all about it.

Economy

The state of the economy depends on many different factors. After a time of optimism and prosperity the economy, contracts, stalls and gets into a downturn. Most of the time following 'natural'predictable cycles, like inventory levels, purchasing index, housing market, stock market, confidence and interest rates.

For many companies, an economic downturn means a change in business strategies and tactics, but also on an operational level. Because most companies will be confronted by a decline in revenue and less profit.

If an economic downturn is also facing unexpected uncontrollable events, sometimes called Black Swans (Taleb, 2008), the world may turn into a crisis and the need to drastically change business models and operational models is even more needed. That is what we are seeing today with the Coronavirus. Covid-19 is not under control and is disrupting the global economic activities, getting the world into a serious crisis. (Look at Wall Street, global value and supply chains, crude price, airlines, retail, shops, bars and restaurants etc.)

Intelligence during an economic downtime and crisis

During times of difficult economic situations (like the crisis we have today), intelligence is exceptionally important, and an intelligence professional must be very sharp and focused on doing the right things for the company. This is the moment for an intelligence professional to make the difference and help a company to survive and prepare for the future.

What should an intelligence professional do?

The intelligence portfolio is broad and deep, covering all the aspects of the market, customers, competitors, supply chain, go-to-market, and so on. Also, intelligence can play a role on different levels: strategic, tactical, and operational.

Regardless of the size of an intelligence team, it is very difficult to do it all. An intelligence professional can make the difference, by providing the right insights that are beneficial for the company.

The most important intelligence activities in the current economic situation are the following: In general, the first step is to understand the nature of the crisis. How is the crisis impacting the economy and company, how long will the crisis last, what are the changes? Check the changes and progress of the economy with a high frequency (daily if needed). Link this to a needs analysis. Talk to all key stakeholders to get a clear picture of what is needed from their perspective. However, you must keep the overall objectives of the company in mind. It is a risk to be distracted by the individual needs of the stakeholders.

The common company needs are key. For the vast majority of companies that means: Short term intelligence. Stakeholders must know what will most probably happen in the near future in order to take the right decisions. For many companies, a crisis means a survival strategy. So, long-term intelligence is less relevant at the moment. Studying just the short-term intelligence requires a lot of work. And so, it is recommended to collaborate with the field: salespeople and business developers, but also customers and vendors. They all have information and together you can build a much better and more holistic view than alone.

The most important intelligence activity is customer intelligence

Many people make the mistake that they are more interested in understanding what their competitors are doing, than analyzing the (potential) customers. Let me be clear: customers bring in the business, you want to make sure they remain your customer.  In other words, you must know how satisfied and loyal your customers are, why they are buying from you, when and how much. Understand their pain-points and identify how we can help our customers; can we meet their needs? Talk to them, ask questions! Here is a 7-point list containing the most logic and common actions that companies take during an economic downturn or crisis:

What do companies do during an economic downturn or crisis?

• Shift from Capex to Opex. Less investments and more maintenance.
• Cost reduction by cutting overhead, get to lean operations and improve operational efficiency.
• In relation to this is a possible restructuring (with spin-offs or buyouts) and cross train employees to create sustainability and efficience.
• Focus on customers, as it is easier to keep a customer than to find a new one. And losing a customer is even more expensive.
• Finding new markets and business opportunities, but also find/create new income streams.
• They might consider collaboration with other firms, in the form of JV´s, strategic alliances or mergers and acquisitions.
• Optimization of the supply chain, including a change in purchasing terms and conditions.

It is important for a market and competitive intelligence professional to understand that these are the main changes companies are dealing with.

Another aspect of customer intelligence is the usage of propensity and segmentation models to get an idea who else would like to buy your products and services. After that you can further analyze the market to find other and new opportunities, maybe in adjacent markets. This makes sense because key stakeholders may want to create alternative income streams. Another element is the supply chain intelligence. This is more important during crises than when the economy is flying high. Companies that see a decline in profit and revenue will optimize their supply chain. Make it leaner, shorter, cheaper. If you understand this intelligence, you can help your company in minimizing risks and reducing expenses while maintaining the quality of the supply chain.

And then, finally and if you have time left over, watch your competitors. Maybe it is time to buy one of your competitors or merge. That would be nice, but more importantly is to look for new entrants. Start-ups that see a big opportunity in an economic downturn. They have new products/services, business models and go-to-market strategies that are disruptive. They may be found in the platform economy. And these types of disruptive competitors can do more harm than the established incumbents you are used to seeing in the business. Maybe one other reason to keep an eye on your competition is to find out if they do things, you have not thought of (a blind spot). But will you consider going into a copy-cat mode and do the same? It is better to listen to your customers to understand what they want to buy from you. Now and in the future. So, what is it that you need to deliver to keep your customer happily buying from you? That is loyalty. Good Luck!

The last point is about communication: whatever you would like to share with your stakeholders, communicate with sensitivity. It is a crisis, so people are sensitive, and you cannot allow any miscommunication or presenting wrong data with wrong conclusions.

Author: Joost Drieman

Source: M-Brain