AI and Human Intelligence in a Post-COVID World

The battle against the Coronavirus has challenged governments, corporations, conglomerates, and industries around the globe. The pandemic has changed every aspect of businesses’ operations and altered the vision of growth. But, it has become an extraordinary catalyst of innovation-led digital transformation, which is driven by the rise of Human machine collaboration.

Human-Machine Collaboration During Health

Already, human-AI collaboration is doing wonders for diagnosis, contact tracing and vaccine development. The acceleration of AI adoption among other industries has also picked up the pace. AI is enabling organizations to apply new ideas and thoughts to succeed in this new normal.

The COVID-19 crisis has put an emphasis on something that has always been true about AI systems. The value one can harness from it is determined by the humans who designed it. In this time, human action and innovation will be crucial to leverage the power of AI.

What can AI do to Mitigate Crises?

AI is a powerful tool that can understand situations and provide solutions just like a human does. The difference is that machines must learn from scratch in different situations. The systems need new data to produce better results.

Fostering Human- AI Collaboration with new Training Datasets

One approach to deal with the novel situation is to support AI systems with new training datasets. Each new piece of information about current conditions is important in making informed decisions. The more we share information about COVID condition, the more aptly the system responds.

Here are some examples of ongoing projects including COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, which provides the text of over 280,000 research articles; the COVID-net open-access neural network, a system that can pick up telltale signs; and an initiative to donate data to fight against virus. All of these projects show significant efforts drawn by humans to gather data so that AI systems can better understand the situation and identify patterns.

Leveraging Human Creativity to Train AI Tools

Another approach to mitigate COVID-19 crises is to use human knowledge and creativity to perform abstraction, which is something AI cannot do. Humans can distinguish between the places where algorithms fall short. They can interpret situations in which old data seems relevant to address critical issues, until new data is not available to deal with the current situation.

Such systems, for example, are algorithms that predict the spread of the COVID-19 data on the basis of previous pandemic data or systems that analyze footfalls to predict their sales. Even though the COVID situation is quite unfamiliar and unique to both human beings and machines, it is still possible to find new avenues for applying AI tools.

AI with Human Intelligence Set to Take Over post COVID world

In the current context, leveraging AI tools will provide more values when it involves human intelligence in several different roles. For example, Data Scientists, they play an important role in determining what AI can achieve and what not. Skilled domain experts understand the nature of the problem and, therefore, discern where historical data makes sense in the current context. Finally, we need talent who pushes us to bring ideas to the table.

Given below are some examples that show how AI and Human Intelligence are working together to solve the pandemic crises.

Identify Disease Outbreak

A Toronto-based startup Bluedot is a brilliant example of human machine collaboration. The company has employed AI technology to identify the occurrence of a new outbreak. Its AI based system works on predicting outbreaks, which combines the power of several AI tools with the specialized knowledge of epidemiologists. Bluedot’s COVID tools provide near real-time intelligence to Governments, hospitals, and airlines.

Virtual Healthcare Assistants

The increasing number of COVID cases has shown that healthcare systems and response measures can go beyond the human level to handle. An AI company, named Stallion.AI, has leveraged natural language processing capabilities to build a healthcare agent that works in multiple languages to answer COVID-19 related queries. The virtual agent assists users in getting reliable information, recommendations on protective measures, and screening individuals whether they need hospitalization or self-isolation.

Similarly, there is another example of Mednections, a doctor referral platform, providing primary care. The portal uses Machine Learning based service (Amazon Polly), Artificial Intelligence and Voice Response that act as a primary interface between patients and specialists to schedule appointments.

Diagnostic AI

AI tools along with human intelligence have improved diagnostic times. A company known as LinkingMed has built an AI technology with expert knowledge in the medical domain. This system can diagnose pneumonia, which is a common complication of COVID-19 infection. The company has utilized Paddle Paddle, Baidu’s open-source deep learning platform to build the AI tool that deals with COVID-19 crises. Outside the medical field, this platform is being used by a variety of industries including automotive, manufacturing and forestry to create specialized applications, respectively.

Facial Recognition

In the Corona times, thermal cameras have been used widely to detect people with high temperatures. Now, with the innovative approach of humans, cameras are equipped with AI based multisensory technology. Such cameras have been used across various facilities like airports, hospitals, clinics, banks, etc. to identify people with fever, and track their movements, recognize their faces, and detect whether an individual is wearing a mask or not.

Information Verification

This is one of the great examples of AI where AI is curbing the spread of misinformation propagated on social media platforms. In the present time, technology behemoths like Google and Facebook are battling to prevent malicious information and phishing. YouTube, on the other hand, is directly redirecting users to WHO and other credible sources for information. Videos including false content are taken down as soon as they are uploaded on the platform.

Human Intelligence is the Key

Advancements in AI applications such as Machine Learning, Data Analytics, Deep Learning, natural language processing, speech recognition and others such as chatbots and facial recognition have come as a beacon of hope to curb the worst effects of pandemic.

Combining human touch and innovation enriches AI to adapt new tasks and behaviors. This in turn derives more specialized applications for AI to deal with the current scenarios. This collaboration ripples out from visionaries to industrialists and governments.

No doubt that decision makers are taking away several lessons from the novel coronavirus situation. However, one of the key takeaways for establishing the new normal is that we need to envision bigger goals about everything and, AI as a tool, can definitely help us overcome those hurdles. The human and machine collaboration works on delivering insights that will shape the living for tomorrow.

If you are looking forward to reinventing your business rules to address your current needs, our consultants will help you devise a plan to harness the long-term consequences of AI. Get in touch with us today.