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Can AI prevent future pandemics?
Forecasting tools
On December 31, BlueDot’s infectious disease risk assessment algorithm, that uses both human and artificial intelligence, alerted it’s customers to the outbreak in China, nine days before WHO.
BlueDot uses foreign language news reports, animal and plant disease networks as well as global ticketing data to help predict where and when infected residents are going next. The algorithm doesn’t make use of social media and was able to predict that the virus would jump form Wuhan to Bankok, Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo within the next few days (Bogoch 2020).
Limitations
It’s hard to see how AI tools could predict future pandemics but they may, if carefully used, help in predicting where an outbreak might head next, as was the case with BlueDot’s forecasting.
Forecasting is difficult using AI based approaches because they rely on very large data sets to be effective and there is no guarantee that one virus will behave like another.
Some attempts have been made to use social media data to model and predict the progress of COVID 19 but the challenge with such data is that it accumulates noise. Google’s Flu predictor platform, based on analysing peoples search trend, estimated more than double the number of doctor visits in 2014. One of the conclusions from this work was that “big data” doesn’t substitute for traditional data collection and analysis. It was dubbed the “big data hubris”.