It was sort of unimaginable till this time that Artificial Intelligence or in any way big data analytics could stumble upon the Covid-19 issue. But, according to many researchers and developers, AI, Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning could be the key to tracking, understanding and even aid in fighting the Coronavirus disease. The flow of data was fortunately never disrupted due to the pandemic. Therefore, the national governments and multi-national companies are tapping all kinds of data from myriad sources like hundreds of millions of mobile and internet device users.
Particularly their location data is being tried to analyse to come up with a model which could help in tracking the spread of the disease. AI driven big data analytics helps in digging out helpful patterns out of the raw and innately meaningless forms of data.
According to some reports big companies like Google are helping countries such as the US in analysing the data from of Google Maps users for predicting the spread pattern of the disease causing pathogen and also in finding the effectiveness of social distancing measures in controlling the spread.
Researchers and organizations are able to mine huge sets of data, the analysis and processing of which is impossible for normal computers let alone humans. This is when supercomputers come in handy. Many institutes and organisation are using supercomputers directly for analytics and processing. Besides from creating mathematical models for digging out the pattern and nature of the disease spread and checking the effectiveness of lockdown and social distancing measures, AI is again useful in the medical research field.
The time when all the superpowers around the world are working hard on developing a vaccine, AI and big data analytics promise to make the process faster by narrowing down all possibilities to ones that are actually the most pragmatic and effective. AI does this by helping with molecular modelling, by using all the databases available about the virus and also the medical pharmacological databases.
For understanding the nature of the disease causing virus and to help combat the pandemic, researchers and organizations need data from all sorts of related and unrelated fields, be it social media, academia, biomedicine etc. Indicating that the approach required in the time of need is multidisciplinary and therefore, its logical to bring people from all fields that is, people from biomedical background to people who understand information technology and AI together in fighting this crisis as quickly as possible .
