The Covid-19 pandemic has devastated lives and livelihoods across the world, but technology in general and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular is helping to significantly mitigate its effect, experts said on Monday at the global online conference, ‘AI Solutions for Covid’, organized by the Department of Computer Science Engineering of Bennett University.

India must develop cutting-edge tech

Telecom and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that the coronavirus-hit world needs to adopt technology and AI even more strongly and efforts are required in areas such as agriculture, healthcare, and education.  Prasad said the government is already focused on harnessing technology to ensure inclusive growth and distribution of relief and social-sector benefits in an equitable manner. His ministry is also trying to see, for instance, how crop yields can be improved by predicting the weather. The government, he said, wants much of the cutting-edge technology to be developed within the country, for which it is also encouraging the startup ecosystem

Sandip Patel, GM for IBM’s India and South Asia business, said the world has witnessed a sudden adoption of digital across governments, businesses, and individuals. IBM, he said, is deploying AI and technology for local language support on Covid queries in Andhra Pradesh. “We have been working to implement a Watson assistant which is hosted on the ICMR portal to respond to specific queries,” he said.

Google Research India director Manish Gupta said technology and AI were deployed to help the thousands of migrant workers who were stranded to find, on Google Maps and through Google search, where food and night shelters were available. “We even allowed voice-based queries,” he said.

Nvidia South Asia MD Vishal Dhupar said they are partnering with doctors to mitigate the COVID problem. AI cameras, he said, can tell if someone has a high temperature. Prof RK Shevgaonkar, vice chancellor of Bennett University, said that technology has ensured that the disruptions due to Covid-19 do not destroy the world completely.

Blended learning will be the new normal

Anant Agarwal, CEO of EdX, a learning platform founded by Harvard and MIT, said many people have now realized that online learning is okay. “These trends will stay with us into the future. Blended learning, with a combination of in-person and online classes, will become the new normal,” he said. “It’s like personalized teaching that took place in ancient times, the ones that are mentioned in the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Princes and princesses had a chance to learn from the best sages at their own pace,” he said.

Rohini Srivathsa, national technology officer at Microsoft India, said data and AI are at the base of every new technology and these would play a critical role in accelerating the pace of recovery.

Sanket Baraley, the founder/CEO of FIGmd, a Google Ventures-backed company that manages health data for 40% of Americans, said India presents a lot of challenges when it comes to deploying AI for social good. The fact that less than a third of India’s population has smartphones also makes AI solutions less feasible, he said.

AI for contactless solutions

Vinish Kathuria, founder, of SenseAI, a venture fund, said solutions have to move towards a voice-driven or a biometric-driven contactless interaction, whether in retail, financial services, hospitality, or others. “We as consumers are very used to a high-touch, high-contact environment,” he said. Startups, he said, can add a lot of value by developing indigenous India-focused solutions.  

Adarsh Natarajan, the founder of health tech startup Aindra, said it would not be possible for a country like India to test its entire population of 1.3 billion and that’s where AI can play a critical role. “What is the need of the hour is quick triaging quick screening, using methods that are portable,” he said.

Amardeep Sibia, founder, of Drishya.ai which develops AI solutions for the energy sector, said contactless tests are an area where AI can add value.

Jaydeep Singh, founder of skill development platform Empass, said language benefits from AI tremendously.  “It boils down to creating content which is of great quality.”

AI can help manage social crisis

Ajay Gupta of Western Michigan University said in this age of disinformation, AI should be used to counter false narratives of COVID-19. “If models can be developed, AI can be really handy there. It depends on how one collects data and curates it,” he said.

Rajeev Agarwal, the computer scientist at the Engineer Research and Development Centre under the US Army Corps of Engineers, said graph algorithms use the relationships among network nodes to learn insights to make actionable predictions. “In the last few months, many graph-related COVID-19 projects have focused on tracing connections between people, identifying clusters of elevated activity,” he said.

Bharat Bhargava, a professor at Purdue University, said if the university does not reopen for the next session, the state of Indiana would lose about $2.1 billion, a majority from student tuition fees.

Originally Published in Times of India

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/how-we-can-use-ai-in-fight-against-covid-19/articleshow/75988582.cms