In Conversation with Nigel Quadros: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Fighting the Pandemic

by Bianca Rodriguez Content Creator

As containment measures have been expanded throughout the planet, the scientific community's pace to understand the nature and mechanisms of spread of the COVID-19 virus has grown to frenzied levels, intending to find a vaccine as soon as possible. However, one fact that is going mostly unnoticed is the contribution that technology is making to all this progress.

In particular, the artificial intelligence sector has been working tirelessly behind the scenes to offer solutions that allow us to overcome the intrinsic limitations of human knowledge in this overwhelming task.

In this article, we briefly describe some examples of how this is being done with insights from Nigel Quadros, an entrepreneur and digital marketing evangelist who has an in-depth knowledge of numerous AI-powered tools and curated marketing strategies widely followed today.

Quadros is known to be a pioneer of programmatic intelligent advertising and understands the integral role of automation in producing desired results. He often speaks about AI’s potential in transforming lives, and while the world faces the dire consequences of COVID-19, Nigel highlights the potential of this technology in helping us get around the crisis.

“Machine learning technologies, or machine learning, are the main engine of artificial intelligence. Essentially, these technologies make it possible to manage huge volumes of data, or Big Data, to detect patterns in them. In this way, they can use said data to predict future results and draw other valuable conclusions.”

“Thus, they could predict the number of deaths from COVID-19 among men over 60 years of age in a given country.” The use of large amounts of data allows a high level of reliability to be assigned to these predictions, as seen in the cases presented by Nigel below.

AI Can Help Understand and Track Spread of COVID-19

BlueDot, a Canadian company, developed the artificial intelligence program that alerted the world to the coronavirus after detecting the first case in China on December 31, 2019. It is a program designed to predict infectious diseases, as well as locate and track their spread. It works by combining artificial intelligence capabilities with the knowledge of epidemiologists who identify how and where to look for new diseases.

BlueDot analyzes more than 100,000 reports a day in a multitude of languages ​​and then sends alarms to its clients in the health sector, governments, public health institutions, and other companies in the field. In the alarms, they include a summary of the unusual outbreaks detected by the AI ​​program and the risks involved.

Programs with artificial intelligence functionalities are designed to predict the appearance of infectious diseases and locate and track their spread.

In Wuhan, China, contact tracing applications (which we will see later) were deployed shortly after the city was closed to contain the virus. The combination of AI with other technologies has made it possible to track and detect the virus's possible carriers.

The use of smart glasses with built-in AI capabilities has made it possible to detect people with fever in large crowds. These devices have enabled security officers to perform hundreds of checks in a few minutes without direct contact. China has deployed a variant of this type of surveillance technology in bus and train stations across the country and other places prone to large crowds of people.

It is a solution that combines AI technologies with machine vision technologies and body temperature measurement. This technology has allowed authorities to control the body temperature, a key symptom of COVID-19, of passers-by in large crowds without the need for direct contact or altering people's behavior.

 In this way, it has been possible to quickly detect those subjects who exceeded a certain temperature threshold. A very effective solution that has avoided the need to embark on manual processes requires much more time to establish direct contact with possible positives.

AI is Helping to Reduce Hospital Workload on Image Analysis Tasks

The tests have been revealed as a critical tool in the fight against COVID-19. Countries like South Korea and Germany owe much of their success in managing the pandemic to the amount of analytics they have carried out. Therefore, increasing the number of tests has become a priority for health authorities.

The main problem is that these are very intensive processes in terms of personnel and time requirements. But AI is offering help with other kinds of tests, like X-ray analysis. There are different AI image processing programs capable of detecting lung abnormalities from chest x-rays and providing diagnoses of potential COVID-19 cases faster than a human radiologist.

Robots with Artificial Intelligence to Minimize Human-to-Human Contact

In recent months, a new range of robots has emerged that, thanks to the artificial intelligence technologies they incorporate, offer great help in the fight against COVID-19, allowing to reduce contact between patients and healthcare personnel - minimizing the risk of transmission.

For example, in China, some companies use drones and robots to carry out deliveries or spray disinfectants in public areas without direct human intervention. Robots are also being used in processes for taking temperatures and detecting symptoms of COVID-19 in people, as well as for dispensing foams and disinfectant gels. Also, robots are being used to serve food and medicine to patients and to disinfect rooms, minimizing contact with human personnel.

Drones have been used for years in humanitarian aid cases.

There are many other examples in other parts of the world. Some US hospitals are using robot dogs to help doctors with diagnostic tasks. The spot is a robot dog developed by the Boston Dynamics company, which is being used to reduce the contact of health professionals with potential contagion cases.

Reluctance to Use AI in Health Field

Since it began a few years ago, artificial intelligence in healthcare applications has been greeted with a certain level of reluctance, especially when it comes to accessing patients' medical data. Access to this type of data raises a multitude of problems regarding privacy and confidentiality of the same. One of the most controversial cases occurred in 2017.

 It emerged that the British public health system had breached data protection regulations by providing access to the health records of 1.6 million patients to a company owned by Google for its use in machine learning analysis tasks.

Contact Tracing Apps

Contact tracing apps are being widely used in Asia by countries like China, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and other regions such as India, Italy, and Israel, while other states are developing similar solutions. Although their operation varies, in general, they all start from the idea that it is possible to use mobile geolocation technologies to detect possible contacts of their owners with other possible positive cases.

Thanks to their AI algorithms, these applications can determine the risk of cross-infection and alert users to this risk. For example, the British government is developing an application (currently in the testing phase) that works using the Bluetooth protocol to detect the proximity between its users and thus be able to alert them when they are near someone with COVID-19 symptoms.

The biggest objections to the use of contact tracing applications are related to privacy and the possibility that governments get used to using this type of technology to track people - that is, the threat that they represent the first step in a drift from the states towards “Big Brother” structures.

However, as Dirk Brockmann, an epidemiologist leading the project to fight the coronavirus at the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, argues, “there is a very simple way that people can help fight the coronavirus, beyond washing hands, and it is by donating your data.” Many people have a mobile device today.

Suppose it could be explained to them that by donating their data, they can contribute to eradicating the virus and that this data is going to be used anonymously. In that case, they could be persuaded to share their data voluntarily. This is a matter of vital importance, because according to the Big Data Institute of the University of Oxford, "a contact tracing application can help stop the pandemic. Still, for this, it would have to be used by 80% of mobile users". This goal sets the bar very high for whatever persuasion system you might opt ​​for.

Final thoughts

“AI is having a huge impact in the fight against the pandemic. It has been adopted in certain healthcare applications - although in some cases its rate of adoption is slower than expected. However, when the battle against the pandemic is over, I believe that artificial intelligence will continue to gain importance for the world's different health, education, fin-tech and industrial systems”, concludes Nigel Quadros.

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Created on Dec 31st 2020 10:08. Viewed 319 times.

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