5 AI trends in the times of COVID

Current situation in the world forced Machine Learning scientists and ML-oriented companies to laser focus on AI solutions that can help to fight the coronavirus. We selected 5 trends in AI that are especially beneficial in current difficult times.

Time-series prediction

How long will coronavirus last in my country? How many people are going to die? How long should we keep the lockdown? The answer to that questions may seem to be a bit of a fortune telling, but day by day we collect more and more data, many countries apply different strategies to deal with the coronavirus and we have some overview of how political decisions influence the curves that show the total diagnosed cases and deaths. Researchers from Alphamoon tackled the problem by enriching the epidemical SEIR model with Bayesian modeling. In their blog, they provide models for three scenarios for Poland: releasing the lockdown after Easter, keeping the lockdown and keeping the lockdown & increasing the number of tested people. For the detailed results and discussion, you can visit their blog.

Image classification and segmentation

One of the main bottlenecks in current coronavirus tests is a long waiting time for the diagnosis. To reduce the delay between taking a sample and the test result scientists are searching for alternative ways of testing. One possible way to do that is to detect COVID-19 based on Computerized Tomography (CT) scans. Studies of Wang et. al. show that this diagnostic problem can be solved by deep classification models. Authors of the proposed solution claim that with this approach they can achieve detection accuracy at 89.5% with balanced specificity of 0.88 and sensitivity of 0.87.

Machine learning models for drug discovery

The process of discovering the new drugs is very time consuming and taking a drug from research to market is estimated to cost on average 2.6 billion dollars, and last more than 10 years (see here for details). The early stage of the drug discovery process can be significantly accelerated with machine learning solutions like deep generative models. The main challenge for the models in this field is to generate novel and valid molecules. Companies like Insilico and AlphaFold are working on the problem and they have some initial successes in that field.

Social Network Analysis

Social media plays a crucial role in spreading information. Decentralisation of this medium has a lot of positive aspects but at the same time it generates at least two problems. Firstly, meaningful information can be lost in a flood of news generated by more popular actors on the social media scene. Secondly, fake news and clickbaits can create a false and dangerous picture of the situation that in turn may lead to destructive behaviours either like or for example (not both) ignoring recommendations of health organisations.

To prevent this problem AI systems can be used to analyse news appearing on social media in real time and assess their credibility as well as detect so-called fake news. Fake news detection is a growing branch of Natural Language Processing.

Object detection on videos

Object detection itself is one of the most actively researched problems in Computer Vision. Applying the same problem to videos instead of static images poses greater challenges but at the same time gives more possibilities for real life applications, including applications aimed to help with the current epidemic. In China robots equipped with cameras were checking if pedestrians were wearing protective masks and warning them if they didn’t. Real time video analysis can be used also to monitor health conditions of patients. It could be especially useful in a case of shortage of specialized medical equipment. There are even ideas to apply such technology so it can assist in proper hand washing to minimize the risk of infection. Tooploox is also working on AI solutions to deal with coronavirus. We’ve created a visual AI system that is able to detect gatherings on monitoring footages. The demonstration video is available here.

The post was prepared collaboratively by Maciej Zięba and Adam Słucki.

If you want to read more about AI, check out our site at Tooploox: https://www.tooploox.com/ai