While we focus on vaccines, anti-virals and respirators in the fight against COVID-19, there's another type of technology that gets less attention, but may be even more important in lessening the impact of the pandemic--information technology. Given that we've been hearing more and more about the importance of widespread testing, we're probably less surprised at this than we might have been a few weeks ago. It's becoming increasingly clear that knowledge is actually one of the most important tools we have. The good news is that we have people working all the angles on this, from artificial intelligence data mining to genetic sequencing. Why is this so important?

A researcher uses IBM's supercomputing infrastructure. Artificial intelligence has a great chance to prove its worth in the ongoing global war against the novel coronavirus. From garnering data about the pandemic to analyzing transmission patterns, providing information about prevention and diagnosing contamination, a variety of AI programs are being used to contain the virus spread and related treatments. IBM, the world's leading cloud platform and computing business, is mobilizing its AI and supercomputing capabilities to support governments' and citizens' efforts to fight the virus. The US company has launched IBM Watson Assistant for Citizens, a public cloud-based virtual assistant system aimed at helping people search information about the COVID-19, such as symptoms, testing sites as well as current status of schools, transportation and other public services.

We've made our coronavirus coverage free for all readers. To get all of HBR's content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter. On Monday March 9, in an effort to address soaring patient demand in Boston, Partners HealthCare went live with a hotline for patients, clinicians, and anyone else with questions and concerns about Covid-19. The goals are to identify and reassure the people who do not need additional care (the vast majority of callers), to direct people with less serious symptoms to relevant information and virtual care options, and to direct the smaller number of high-risk and higher-acuity patients to the most appropriate resources, including testing sites, newly created respiratory illness clinics, or in certain cases, emergency departments. As the hotline became overwhelmed, the average wait time peaked at 30 minutes.

When the new coronavirus began appearing in the U.S. this year, Memorial Health System in Illinois knew it needed to prepare to screen large swaths of worried patients. So the Springfield-based system set up drive-through screening sites to help triage those with respiratory symptoms. What it didn't expect was the level of interest, amassing more than 4,000 interactions with patients in one week. "We had a lot of what I'll call the'worried well,' " said Jay Roszhart, president of Memorial Health System's ambulatory group. "A lot of individuals who were just wanting information."

In a new study in China, a deep learning model detected COVID19 caused pneumonia from CT scans with comparable performance to expert radiologists. CT is the preferred imaging method for evaluating lung infection, assessing progression, and determining treatment options for patients with pneumonia caused by COVID19. In this study, radiologists used AI to help them evaluate the progression of disease, and with the assistance of this model, radiologists' read time decreased by 65%. The model achieved a per-patient sensitivity of 100% and accuracy of 95.24%. This AI could help improve the efficiency of evaluation and diagnosis especially if the number of people with the virus increases. This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed. This paper reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice. Harvard Medical School students have created a COVID19 curriculum. It includes information about epidemiology, clinical management, testing, treatment, vaccine development, and communication. Each section was reviewed by at least two Harvard Medical School faculty experts. Many modules reference supplemental resources that may be worth accessing in the future and to find the most current statistics of the pandemic. Also included are one-page summaries of each module's key takeaways. COVID19 testing in South Korea is free and convenient and over 250,000 people have already been tested. The South Korean data is valuable because they are testing people who have symptoms and people who have no symptoms. This is unusual because most countries are only testing people who are sick to confirm that they have the virus. South Korea is testing everyone, including asymptomatic people, as a public health measure so that anyone who has the virus can isolate even if they don't feel sick. In most countries asymptomatic people are not tested for COVID19. For example Italy is only testing symptomatic people, whereas South Korea tests everyone and picks up more mild cases.

Hexa Food's IoT team has deployed Huawei's ModelArts coupled with the intelligent device Atlas 500 to accurately identify the quality of the chilies it uses in spice blends. The AI can distinguish good chilies from bad, improving production efficiency and the quality of spices available to chefs and homes across Malaysia. Known as the "Kingdom of Spices", Malaysia is a multi-ethnic nation comprising Malays, Chinese, Indians, and the indigenous Orang Asli people. Its diverse culture is reflected in its cuisine, which draws from a multicultural heritage that sees hundreds of spices add flavor to the Malaysian diet. And of these, the colorful, aromatic, and spicy chili powder is a mainstay of many of the nation's signature dishes.

The coronavirus outbreak has rapidly accelerated the nation's slow-moving effort to incorporate artificial intelligence into medical care, as hospitals grasp onto experimental technologies to relieve an unprecedented strain on their resources. AI has become one of the first lines of defense in the pandemic. Hospitals are using it to help screen and triage patients and identify those most likely to develop severe symptoms. They're scanning faces to check temperatures and harnessing fitness tracker data, to zero in on individual cases and potential clusters. They are also using AI to keep tabs on the virus in their own communities.

ERP systems need to lose their cumbersome heritage and open up to third-party applications, in order to help businesses benefit from technological innovations more quickly. Artificial intelligence (AI) will have a significant impact on companies and their business models over the next five years--85 percent of CEOs surveyed in PwC's 22nd Annual Global CEO Survey are convinced of this. But with only 33 percent having dipped their toe into AI for'limited uses', and fewer than one in ten using it on a wide scale, the range of applications has been limited so far. However, this is soon set to change. Despite the use of AI being a distant dream for many businesses, the current maturity of intelligent technologies and the expectations of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in particular--to support innovations--have fundamentally changed business demands.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: 200,000 deaths from virus is optimistic Take a look inside Spain's largest hospital Cost of failing to respond to virus could be'unimaginable'

Ai-Da is the world's first ultra-realistic artist robot powered by AI and named after Ada Lovelace, the first female computer programmer in the world. She is a humanoid with human facial features and a robotic body created by the Oxfordians, a group of cutting-edge art and technology experts. Embedded with a groundbreaking algorithm, she has taken the scientific and art world by surprise, now becoming an intense subject of conversation in over 900 publications worldwide. She has already collaborated with Tate Exchange and WIRED at the Barbican, Ars Electronica, and will be performing at the Louvre Abu-Dhabi later this year. Ai-Da's creations are fragmented and splintered, her drawings are unsettling.