Using artificial intelligence against the spread of COVID-19 | Artificial Intelligence - JD Supra

“Artificial intelligence is developing fast”, reports Fabia Cairoli, Data protection specialist and Giangiacomo Olivi, Partner at Dentons - Head of TM. 

Photo: raymond wijaya via Flickr

The introduction to the White Paper on Artificial Intelligence, issued by the European Commission in February 2020, makes it very clear why this technology is becoming a hot topic.

This is confirmed during these challenging times, with an increasing consensus about the importance of using AI to fight against COVID-19: we need predictive technology to support us in determining how the virus is spreading, what are its mutation patterns, as well as who are the people mostly at risk...  

An overview of the uses of AI against the pandemic AI-based projects against the pandemic are steadily increasing as the virus spreads throughout the world. The main projects and purposes include the following:

Tracking of patients and potentially affected people: This requires the use of citizens’ localization data in order to assess whether a person may have been affected and warn them. The implication of using such a technology is the potential reduction in the citizens’ rights to freedom and privacy;

Detection of symptoms and primary care of patients: Asking citizens to complete a questionnaire and having an AI system analyze the data, can significantly alleviate the workload of the health care system. Among the implemented / discussed solutions are:

Interactive voice response systems and chat-bots for patient self-triage (as reported by the Harvard Business Review, the use of such tools is increasing);

Image-based medical diagnosis (e.g. chest x-rays) and forecasts of the impact of the virus on patients, based on their symptoms;

Monitoring of public areas and transportation means in order to detect situations where people are not complying with public order rules;

Hindering fake news, by adding fact-checker systems (e.g. Whatsapp has started a pilot project called Facta, which watches the news and provides an analysis of those items that are found to be fake);

Forecasting the epidemic’s spread over time and space. This purpose is probably one of the most difficult as there is no historical tracking of the pandemic, as it is an extraordinary event.

The race is on: Many institutions and universities, that were already implementing AI systems, are currently speeding up their finalization / conversion to make them an appropriate tool to fight the pandemic.
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Source: JD Supra