Most current anomaly detection methods suffer from the curse of dimensionality when dealing with high-dimensional data. We propose an anomaly detection algorithm that can scale to high-dimensional data using concepts from the theory of large deviations. The proposed Large Deviations Anomaly Detection (LAD) algorithm is shown to outperform state of art anomaly detection methods on a variety of large and high-dimensional benchmark data sets. Exploiting the ability of the algorithm to scale to high-dimensional data, we propose an online anomaly detection method to identify anomalies in a collection of multivariate time series. We demonstrate the applicability of the online algorithm in identifying counties in the United States with anomalous trends in terms of COVID-19 related cases and deaths. Several of the identified anomalous counties correlate with counties with documented poor response to the COVID pandemic.

In 2013, IBM and University of Texas Anderson Cancer Center developed an AI based Oncology Expert Advisor. According to IBM Watson, it analyzes patients medical records, summarizes and extracts information from vast medical literature, research to provide an assistive solution to Oncologists, thereby helping them make better decisions. According to an article on The Verge, the product demonstrated a series of poor recommendations. Like recommending a drug to a lady suffering from bleeding that would increase the bleeding. "A parrot with an internet connection" - were the words used to describe a modern AI based chat bot built by engineers at Microsoft in March 2016. 'Tay', a conversational twitter bot was designed to have'playful' conversations with users. It was supposed to learn from the conversations. It took literally 24 hours for twitter users to corrupt it.