How AI and lab-on-a-chip pave the way for economical solutions.

We could be moving into the end game with the Covid-19 pandemic, at least as far as the severest effects are concerned. Clearly, the virus and its mutations are here to stay, and the future will be about protecting us through immunization and developing better treatments. The fact that effective vaccinations have become available only a year after the pandemic was recognized is remarkable. It’s partly due to the speed with which researchers have been able to do the data crunching needed to model and understand how best to attack the virus.

In the past, the computations involved in sequencing the virus DNA would have taken vast quantities of computer time and prolonged development of the vaccine. Cloud computing using AI accelerators has dramatically shortened the time to complete the technical work involved in creating the vaccines now being rolled out.

It would be great if we could harness our technologies to create an early warning system when clusters of unusual diseases or events occur anywhere in the world. That’s exactly what organizations like BlueDot are doing right now. Indeed, BlueDot says it spotted the cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan in December 2019 that we now know was the coronavirus. To monitor the spread of infectious diseases around the world, it analyzes a huge number of variables, not only official public health data but also climate information, international travel patterns, animal and insect population data, and others. This relies on the ability of AI to detect patterns, and exceptions to those patterns, hidden within the enormous body of information. By sifting through the reports and data points collected every few minutes, 24 hours a day, from sources around the world, using techniques like machine learning and natural language processing, BlueDot brings a small number of cases to the attention of experts for further investigation. Only with AI do we have a hope of finding those cases.

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Stronger, faster and more robust networks will be one of the positive legacies of the pandemic.

Hopefully, we will soon be able to start living our post-Covid-19 lives. Going forward, some of us want fundamental changes. Others are keen to return to the way things were. Although we will be pleased to put this situation behind us, some things are here to stay. One, obviously, is the lethal group of coronaviruses that will surely continue to take lives after lockdown (we hope at a greatly reduced rate). Another, I believe, is the tendency for many of us to continue working from home (WFH) to a much greater extent than before.

WFH has been one of the headline trends of this crisis. Although clearly not to everyone’s taste, it could turn into a revolution founded on the internet technologies that allow us to meet with colleagues online, access data and tools remotely, and benefit from high connection speeds wherever we are – wired or wireless. That so many can do meaningful work this way also reflects the soft nature of many tasks associated with getting things done in developed economies. These soft deliverables liberate us from location and will be critical to our economic survival of this pandemic.

Many are keen to recover the social dimension to our working lives. While physically working together in the same space and time to achieve shared goals is a powerful part of team building and cohesion, we can also take advantage of the flexibility to ease some of the more stressful aspects, such as traveling and being away from loved ones.  

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