How AI is Helping in the Battle Against COVID-19

How AI is Helping in the Battle Against COVID-19

Along with healthcare centers, AI using chatbots, facial recognition, and speech recognition has undoubtedly aided the control of COVID-19 Pandemic to curb its effects.


Along with healthcare centers, AI using chatbots, facial recognition, and speech recognition has undoubtedly aided the control of COVID-19 Pandemic to curb its effects.

From time immemorial, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has grown at a rapid pace and has been a supporting hand across different platforms. Due to the Pandemic, different kinds of researching and detailing emerge, and the data pool is growing exponentially beyond the capacity of human intelligence. AI is known for identifying patterns from big data and has become a green card in handling the crisis.

Advancement in AI applications like natural language processing, data analytics, machine learning, speech recognition, deep learning, and other various kinds of tech platforms like chatbots and facial recognition has not only to be used for diagnosis but also vaccine development and contract tracing. Let's take a look at how AI has been applied to tackle the virus below.

Chatbots

A vast number of COVID-19 cases have shown that the medical and healthcare systems and response measures can be overwhelmed. Canada-based Stallion.AI has taken advantage of its natural language processing abilities to build a multilingual healthcare agent. This agent helps in answering all the questions asked related to COVID-19. It also helps to provide reliable data and clear guidelines, recommends protection steps and measures, checks and monitors the symptom, and even advises the people whether they need a hospital, screening, or a self-isolation at their respective homes.

Facial Recognition and Fever Detector AI

Thermal cameras are used for detecting people with fever. One of the drawbacks of using this technology is the need for a human operator. Now, the cameras processing AI-based multisensory technology are used in airports, hospitals, and nursing homes. The most significant advantage of using the technology is that they automatically detect the fever and also track the movement, recognize the faces, and detect whether the person is wearing a mask or not.

The world struggles hard to cope up with the effects of coronavirus positive. The measures can be taken from the expertise and bravery of the healthcare workers, along with the great efforts of AI technology used to help the healthcare platforms.

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The New Face of Smart Cities Post COVID-19

The conceptualization of smart cities is not very recent; however, this pandemic has made the cities to reconsider the execution of their plans to cater to the new lifestyle needs.

Redesigning cityscapes has been a prominent aspect in the process of urbanization. It is now clear that smart cities have to move beyond the Internet of Things and establish a more comprehensive approach to assimilate the social layout, economic and environmental conditions, and the cultural aspect, and build a more resilient infrastructure ensuring good health, and safety to the residents along with environmental conservation.

Addressing the mobility issues

Focus now lies in reducing traffics on roads and crowds in public transports, which are the major infection points. To address this issue, The French capital is planning to provide 650km additional cycle lanes, looking at the hike in cyclist numbers. On similar lines, the Scottish Government has announced an allocation of €10 million for cycling and walking routes. These steps would not just maintain social distancing norms and secure walking and cycling regimes but also add to environmental gains by reducing emissions. Meantime, the private sector is keen on betting on shared mobility.

Sustaining the food supply and related employment

Another key aspect for nurturing cities amidst the pandemic is sufficient stocking and distribution of food resources. The smart strategies have brought up solutions to bring consumers closer to their food. The concept of a pop-up marketplace has come up, which comprises a small number of stalls, set up in an area that can be easily assembled from where the city dwellers can purchase their necessary commodities. The UK government has initiated programs for harvesting British crops by the workers laid off due to the pandemic, thereby meeting the food demand as well as offer jobs to dismissed workers. Governments of several countries are aiming to link farmers to job seekers for saving their crop stock as well as food supply across their countries.

While it seems difficult to solve the enigma of building self-sufficient city models, smart cities like Amsterdam are aiming to deploy the doughnut model introduced by Kate Raworth. The model lists down the necessities of society including, food, water, energy, education, and the related issues of climate change, biodiversity, pollution, and others, and suggests that humans cannot disturb these boundaries. Failure in meeting social needs traps people into the hole of the doughnut while stepping beyond the ecological boundaries poses a risk of overshooting. So people need to be within limits to ensure sustainability. Housing affordability issues also accompany the rest in some of these cities.

The coming years are expecting a larger population of city dwellers. At this hour, clearly, smart cities need to grow smarter to fine-tune with the changing landscapes of the world after COVID-19.

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Conversion Capital Launches Conversion Labs to tackle Post Covid-19 Challenges; Welcomes Marinelli to its Team

At his new position, Marinelli will offer counsel and direction, and invest in the next generation of software, cloud, and data startups that are striving to tackle the ever-growing challenges in the post-COVID-19 era, with a prime focus on building software infrastructure for highly regulated industries such as government, healthcare, and financial services

Conversion Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm, announced that former Blend CTO and Co-founder Eugene Marinelli joined the firm as its newest partner. At his new position, Marinelli will offer counsel and direction, and invest in the next generation of software, cloud, and data startups that are striving to tackle the ever-growing challenges in the post-COVID-19 era, with a prime focus on building software infrastructure for highly regulated industries such as government, healthcare, and financial services.

Along with the new appointment, Conversion Capital is also launching Conversion Labs, which is expected to bring entrepreneurs and engineers under a single roof to develop and scale software solutions for the most pressing challenges reshaping society during and after the pandemic. Former Sun Microsystems CEO and Co-founder Scott McNealy is a key advisor on the initiative.

Along with McNealy, Marinelli will lead Conversion Labs to help entrepreneurs and engineers found and build companies to transition the world to a post-pandemic economy.

"Conversion Capital has been instrumental to Blend's success and has a track record of being the first to fund and build some of the most exciting startups in the past decade, from Improbable to Booster Fuels," Marinelli said. "COVID-19 has accelerated technology adoption by a decade in the past two months, catalyzing a transition to a new economy. Conversion Capital is uniquely positioned to lead us into this new era with investments in startups that will shape the post-COVID-19 recovery across finance, healthcare, and government."

"Eugene's experience at Palantir and Blend makes him uniquely positioned to help find and support other early-stage software startups that are reinventing legacy industries and help them achieve breakout scale," said Conversion Capital Managing Partner Christian Lawless. "Eugene is incredible at scaling engineering teams and will be a vital force multiplier for our new initiative to tackle some of society's biggest challenges."

Supported by influential business leaders including CAA Founder Michael Ovitz, Blackrock Chief Investment Officer Rick Rieder, and former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Glenn Hubbard, Conversion Capital mainly focuses on software, data, and cloud companies in regulated industries such as financial services, government, and healthcare. Conversion Capital has been an early investor in many high-profile unicorn companies, including Blend, Improbable, Figure, and Dataminr, as well as emerging startups like Booster Fuels, Qualia, AiLens, Ramp and Wisetack.

"Seismic change across the global economy is inevitable — the mainframe, hardware and legacy costs to traditional companies could be crippling without innovation to newer more effective technologies with lower, more variable costs," said Scott McNealy, Founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems. "Conversion Capital is one of only a handful of funds positioned at the forefront of this transition."

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