Specialized in predicting the global spread of infectious diseases, BlueDot AI would have anticipated the Chinese coronavirus epidemic. Thus, the company responsible for this artificial intelligence is one of the first whistleblowers, ten days before the experts.
Since November 2019, over6,000 cases and 130 deaths have been identified because of the Chinese coronavirus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States had communicated on January 6, 2020 on the risks of an epidemic. The World Health Organization did the same on January 9. However, according to a Wired article published on January 25, the start-up BlueDot is among the first whistleblowers.
In 2014, this Canadian-based company founded an artificial intelligence whose objective is to monitor, contextualize and anticipate the risks of infectious diseases. However, BlueDot warned its customers on December 31, 2019 , including certain institutions present in Canada and the United States. Among the other known sources on this same date, we find the Hong Kong's Center for Health Protection (CHP) as well as the Reuters news agency.
Kamran Khan, founder of BlueDot reminded that governments are not obliged to provide information in real time. According to the person concerned, the AI did not rely on sources from social networks to establish its forecasts. On the other hand, the data used are those of the airlines . These then allowed the AI to know that the virus was quickly going to be the cause of cases in several Asian cities such as Seoul, Taipei, Bangkok or Tokyo.
After providing its results to its customers, BlueDot has also shared them with public health officials in more than a dozen countries. According to the start-up, predictive models of the type used by AI have a real interest in knowing the spread of new viruses and the possibility of curbing it. However, a negative point remains to be underlined. The fact is that BlueDot did not report the success rate of its technology apart from forecasts related to the coronavirus. In other words, the health authorities have not fully taken into account these predictions precisely for this reason.
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