Covid-19

43 Posts

Security cameras somewhere around the Red Square in Moscow, Russia
Covid-19

From Pandemic to Panopticon: How Russia is using face recognition to punish dissidents.

Governments are repurposing Covid-focused face recognition systems as tools of repression. Russia’s internal security forces are using Moscow’s visual surveillance system, initially meant to help enforce pandemic-era restrictions, to crack down on anti-government...
Bat and viruses symbols
Covid-19

Predicting the Next Pandemic: Using AI to Predict the Next Pandemic

Odds are that the next mass contagion will jump to humans from animals. But which species? Virus hunters are using learning algorithms to learn which animals are likely to carry microbes that pose a danger to humans.
Matt Zeiler
Covid-19

Matt Zeiler: Advance AI for good

There’s a reason why artificial intelligence is sometimes referred to as “software 2.0”: It represents the most significant technological advance in decades. Like any groundbreaking invention, it raises concerns about the future, and much of the media focus is on the threats it brings.
Animated image showing different Zillow listings
Covid-19

Price Prediction Turns Perilous: How Covid Broke Zillow's Pricing Algorithm

The real-estate website Zillow bought and sold homes based on prices estimated by an algorithm — until Covid-19 confounded the model’s predictive power. Zillow, whose core business is providing real-estate information for prospective buyers, shut down its house-flipping division after...
Series of images explaining how the system Eva works
Covid-19

Who Needs a Covid Test? AI Decides: Greek Border Patrol Used AI to Screen for Covid

Greece’s border agents last year had enough Covid tests to swab only 17 percent of people who sought to enter the country. They managed the shortage by using an AI system to flag high-risk visitors.
Animation showing AlphaFold working
Covid-19

Biomedical Treasure Chest: DeepMind open sources AlphaFold and protein databases.

DeepMind opened access to AlphaFold, a model that finds the shapes of proteins, and to its output so far — a potential cornucopia for biomedical research. The research lab, a division of Google’s parent company Alphabet, made AlphaFold freely available.
Covid-19 over a graph
Covid-19

AI Against Covid Progress Report: A review of how AI was used to fight Covid-19.

A new report assessed how AI has helped address Covid-19 and where it has fallen short.
AI face recognition system for borderline patrol
Covid-19

Borderline AI: How U.S. Border Patrol uses AI to process asylum requests.

U.S. immigration officials expect over 2 million migrants to reach the country’s southern border by the end of the year. They’re counting on face recognition to streamline processing of those who seek asylum.
Protein structures
Covid-19

What AI Knows About Proteins: NLP systems can be used to code amino acids.

Transformer models trained on sequences of amino acids that form proteins have had success classifying and generating viable sequences. New research shows that they also capture information about protein structure.
Data related to DeepCE, a system designed to predict how particular drugs will influence the amounts of RNA
Covid-19

Old Drugs for New Ailments: AI searches for Covid-19 treatments among existing drugs.

Many medical drugs work by modulating the body’s production of specific proteins. Recent research aimed to predict this activity, enabling researchers to identify drugs that might counteract the effects of Covid-19.
Selected data from AI Index, an annual report from Stanford University
Covid-19

AI for Business Is Booming: Stanford's 2021 AI Index shows commercial AI on the rise.

Commercial AI research and deployments are on the rise, a new study highlights. The latest edition of the AI Index, an annual report from Stanford University, documents key trends in the field including the growing importance of private industry and the erosion of U.S. dominance in research.
Graph showing system that examines X-ray images to predict which Covid-19 patients are at greatest risk of decline
Covid-19

Covid-19 Triage: Computer vision for x-rays helps triage Covid-19 patients.

The pandemic has pushed hospitals to their limits. A new machine learning system could help doctors make sure the most severe cases get timely, appropriate care.
Series of images showing a variety of medical AI products
Covid-19

Medical AI’s Hidden Data: Why many medical AI devices are black boxes.

U.S. government approval of medical AI products is on the upswing — but information about how such systems were built is largely unavailable. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a a plethora of AI-driven medical systems.
Data related to a language model that predicts mutations that would enable infectious viruses
Covid-19

The Language of Viruses: Researchers trained a neural net to predict viruses in DNA.

A neural network learned to read the genes of viruses as though they were text. That could enable researchers to page ahead for potentially dangerous mutations. Researchers at MIT trained a language model to predict mutations that would enable infectious viruses to become even more virulent.
Covid Fast Fax operating
Covid-19

The Fax About Tracking Covid: A deep learning system for sorting critical Covid-19 cases.

A pair of neural networks is helping to prioritize Covid-19 cases for contact tracing. The public health department of California’s Contra Costa County is using deep learning to sort Covid-19 cases reported via the pre-internet technology known as fax.
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