COVID-19 Data and AI: The health and technology ministers of USA from the White House Office of Science and Technology asked for qualified scientists who are ready to "dig" into the terabytes of available data from research on COVID 19.
To give scientists easy access to research, the US government has uploaded a database to a central hub called The COVID 19 Open Research Dataset.
So data scientists will have a way of helping health care workers and policymakers understand a growing body of data that holds the key to making informed decisions.
At present, we do not have the basic knowledge about COVID 19 as an answer to the most fundamental question: How many people have been infected? Health experts agree that guiding difficult future decisions requires reliable data that answers this question as well as other key questions.
What role should data scientists play in pandemic responses?
Gordon McDonald, is its CEO Capice, a team of AI experts from Florida, has the tools and deep learning network that corporate clients use to quickly train their models and create forecasts on things like customer consumption habits, product pricing and employee fatigue. Following a call for help from the White House, McDonald's decided to temporarily shift the company's priorities, and resources, to help with COVID data 19.
"The good news is that we have a lot of data," he said. "The bad news is that the organization and accessibility of this data does not exist and there are difficulties in accessing it."
“Deep Learning is not a standard algorithm: a user literally “teaches” the platform with hundreds of examples of various classifications or predictions. Then future classifications and predictions will be in the hands of the deep learning platform.”
Is there any progress so far? How can the effort evolve in the coming weeks or months?
“There is at least one company, engine.is, that is trying to connect data science researchers with technology. I have provided the full ones services of my company in this effort, but all Deep Learning starts with data, and data is what we need.”
More coordination is needed, McDonald says. From this pandemic, a new context is likely to emerge from which to develop data science like the first line to address urgent and developing problems such as pandemics.
Until then, the ad hoc response is the best we have.
The interview at McDonald's was taken by Greg Nichols for ZDNet.
