The Coronavirus pandemic is a pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).
First identified in Wuhan, PR China, in December 2019, the outbreak spread to over 179 countries before being recognized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization 11 March 2020.
Up until today, there are more than 800,000 infected people out of which more than 40,000 lost their lives. The percentage of deaths rises every day, and the countries around the world are still in disbelief of the situation there are in.
As human beings, who probably reached the peak of our evolution not counting the artificial intelligent organism that we are going to create in the future, we must think straight and come up with ideas of how can we stop this virus.
In this article we are going to talk about, how can we use Machine Learning, Data Science, Deep Learning and programming in general in order to win the race against the spread of the Coronavirus.
Here are awesome books about Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence you must read:
Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow – Buy from Amazon
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach – Buy from Amazon
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order – Buy from Amazon
Top ideas that can help us in the fight against coronavirus
The achievements made by using Artificial Intelligence (AI) are phenomenal in a sense of how much societies have improved since we started “running everything” on AI power.
Now, all of these achievements and improvements were made in times of no trouble, in times where the higher percentage of the population was living the normal, everyday life.
But how good can AI be in these times of trouble, where the whole globe is on lockdown, and where we are losing lives, our economy is crashing and or future cannot see a light on the end of the tunnel.
So, let’s cut to the point if this article. Here are our top ideas where Machine Learning, Data Science, Deep Learning and computer programming can help in order to defeat the Coronavirus.
Finding the drug or vaccine that will cure the Coronavirus
There are tons of examples, of how Machine Learning(ML), Deep Learning(DL), Computer Vision(CV) are used in medicine in order to find new drugs, discover cancers, create robotic medical assistants, create intelligence life assistance machines and whatnot.
The ability to make precise predictions, makes the ML algorithms perfect for predicting how will Coronavirus react when different chemical compounds are being deployed to fight it.
A good example of this is DeepMind’s research for computational predictions of protein structures associated with COVID-19.
Another good example is Kaggle, where you can find a couple of good medical datasets that can help in creating different models based on the nature of the data in order to help the race against the fast spread of the Coronavirus.
Some of the Kaggle’s data sets are: Public Health, Data Science for COVID-19 (DS4C), etc.
Predicting the number of infected people by the Coronavirus
Since most of the algorithms in Machine Learning are used for making predictions, this is where it can be used the most. There are a couple of good datasets on Kaggle that can help you do predictions.
Most of the examples are based on Time Series Analyses. As a matter of fact, we have to articles highly supported by the community, that address the problem of predicting the number of infected people by the Coronavirus.
Our articles are:
- Forecasting the Spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) Using Python (where we do predictions using FbProphet library by Facebook)
- Predicting the Number of Infected People by the Coronavirus with Python Code (where we do predictions using stochastic processes like Autoregressive model, ARIMA model and SARIMA model)
- This Is How Python Can Defeat The Coronavirus (COVID-19)
- How To Predict Coronavirus (COVID-19) Cases Using Deep Learning in Python
Diagnosing the medical images that contain information about Coronavirus
As we said in the first part, ML algorithms (especially ones in the Computer Vision field) are known to be effective in extracting information out of the image. Pared with Deep Learning those algorithms can be powerful weapons against the Coronavirus.
There are very powerful tools that can help in this area, like OpenCV which are very easy to use and to understand. The way that this can work is by following the state of patients with mild conditions and follow the progress of the Coronavirus.
That way we are going to know what the virus is doing at a certain stage, and will know how to act properly.
Building autonomous drones that will deliver groceries to our homes
We know that staying in quarantine and reducing the communication with the rest of the outside world, for now, is proven as one of the most effective methods in stopping the spread of the Coronavirus.
The problem with no going out is that people cannot buy food and other groceries that are a crucial part of our day to day life. Well, autonomous drones can help in this a lot.
The big companies already addressed this problem, years before the Coronavirus. The best examples are: Amazon Prime Air, Google Wing, Rakuten Drone, Walmart Drones, etc.
Predicting the stock market
There is no doubt that Coronavirus is having an impact on the stock market, as a matter of fact, it crushed most of it. Crude oil prices are drowning, currencies are losing their value, all resulting in companies sacking people in order to save themselves.
There are proven examples that we can do predictions on the stock market by taking in count the right variables. This can be helpful in order to make the right decisions about certain things in order to preserve a higher percentage of their value.
Conclusion
Coronavirus (COVID-19) is a serious thing, and it is all around us. If we don’t act together, it will destroy not just our lives, but the lives of the generations that follow. That’s why it should be our mission to work on this threat together, as a unit, and to bring as much as we can to stop it.
These are our ideas of how can we use Machine Learning, Data Science, Deep Learning in order to win the fight against the Coronavirus.
Please if you have some ideas of your own, let us know down in the comments.
Our platform has tons of other articles in other AI fields, and those are free and will be free forever, so if you want to learn new stuff for free, do check them out.
Please listen to the advice that our governments are sharing with us, in order to prevail in these dark times of our civilization.
Like with every post we do, we encourage you to continue learning, trying and creating.
