During this month’s MBZUAI Talks session — hosted by Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), the world’s first graduate-level, research-based artificial intelligence (AI) university — Dr. Mohammad Yaqub, assistant professor at MBZUAI and research fellow at the University of Oxford, discussed the role of AI in the current fight against COVID-19, as well as how it can be applied to help identify future pandemics and halt their spread.
The “How does AI help fight the COVID-19 pandemic?” webinar was the second in the MBZUAI Talks series, which sees experts in the field of AI host informative sessions to provide members of the public with a deeper understanding of artificial intelligence and its transformative potential.
During the webinar, Dr. Yaqub provided an overview of several innovative solutions leveraging AI to help detect, respond and recover from the pandemic. He also discussed how AI could predict future infections, facilitate health care solutions, accelerate research to understand and treat COVID-19, and even predict the impact of government policy decisions.
Dr. Yaqub said: “AI could make post-pandemic recovery quicker, easier and more robust. During the COVID-19 pandemic, AI has been crucial in tackling not only the health care consequences of the disease but also other important implications which affect social, economic and policy making decisions. The world is facing many challenges as it fights COVID-19, however, advances in AI solutions could be influential in helping predict, detect and treat future pandemics.”
Dr. Yaqub explained how multiple companies had used AI and successfully flagged an unusual increase in pneumonia cases in Wuhan, the day before China announced the new virus. The companies used their own AI algorithms to mine news and social media sources to recognize unusual patterns.
In terms of tracking infections, AI-driven trackers rely on processing data from multiple sources, such as phone-to-phone Bluetooth communications, geolocation, hospital admissions, flight information and credit card transactions. Dr. Yaqub said an AI algorithm could utilize this data and provide a much more complex and robust way of tracking infections. For example, if someone tested positive, credit card data could be used to determine which shops or restaurants they had visited and who they had come in contact with, helping trace the spread of the virus.
The recorded discussion can be found on www.mbzuai.ac.ae/aitalks.
