Artificial Intelligence tools and applications have skillfully tried to manage the analysis, diagnosis, tracing, and development of the pandemic in ways unthinkable with manpower solely. The greatest dilemma with this pandemic was that no one knew what it was and how it would react during the beginning of the pandemic. To make matters worse, Covid 19 has been rapidly mutating since its start, and researchers around the world aren't still quite prepared to interact with such a delicate mutating variant that has claimed hundreds and thousands of lives and has essentially changed the course of history forever. This is where AI's prowess comes into play. With deep learning and the combination of researchers from all around the world, Artificial Intelligence has helped us combat the pandemic in unimaginable ways. The foremost task of AI was to collect as much data as possible about the Coronavirus.

One of the effects of the COVID-19 public health emergency is that it has added urgency and speed to technology transformations that were already occurring, such as cloud migration and deployments of artificial intelligence and machine learning. At few places is that shift more pronounced than at Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic, which six months before the pandemic arrived in the United States had embarked on a decade-long strategic partnership with Google Cloud. "Our partnership will propel a multitude of AI projects currently spearheaded by our scientists and physicians, and will provide technology tools to unlock the value of data and deliver answers at a scale much greater than today," said Mayo CIO Cris Ross at the time. Shortly after the partnership was announced, toward the end of 2019, the health system hired longtime CIO Dr. John Halamka as president of Mayo Clinic Platform, tasking him with leading a cloud-hosted, AI-powered digital transformation across the enterprise. In the months since, like the rest of the world, Mayo Clinic has found itself tested and challenged by the pandemic and its ripple effect – but has also embraced the moment as an inflection point, a powerful moment to push forward with an array of new use cases to drive quality improvement, streamline efficiency, and boost the health of patients and populations in the years ahead.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been one of the biggest technology success stories of the past decade. As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, researchers and entrepreneurs stepped up to devise new ways to combat it. From understanding and preventing the spread of the virus to diagnosing and treating it, startups and established technology companies in India are actively leveraging AI to support this fight. Decision makers have increasingly relied on computer simulations to understand how the pandemic situation will evolve over time. TCS, in collaboration with Pune-based Prayas Health Group, is using digital twins to forecast the spread of COVID-19 in urban districts.

Artificial intelligence has the power to help put an end to the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only can techniques of machine learning and natural language processing be used to track and report Covid-19 infection rates, but other AI techniques can also be used to make smarter decisions about everything from when states should reopen to how vaccines are designed. Now, MIT researchers working on seven groundbreaking projects on Covid-19 will be funded to more rapidly develop and apply novel AI techniques to improve medical response and slow the pandemic spread. Earlier this year, the C3.ai DTI) formed, with the goal of attracting the world's leading scientists to join in a coordinated and innovative effort to advance the digital transformation of businesses, governments, and society. The consortium is dedicated to accelerating advances in research and combining machine learning, artificial intelligence, internet of things, ethics, and public policy -- for enhancing societal outcomes.

The C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute has awarded six UC Berkeley faculty funding to use AI to mitigate the threat of COVID-19. Bottom row, from left: Karen Chapple, Teresa Head-Gordon and Jennifer Listgarten. Six UC Berkeley-led projects have won funding from the recently launched C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute to harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to combat the spread of COVID-19 and other emerging diseases. These wide-ranging research projects will use AI and machine learning tools to understand and reduce the threat posed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a variety of ways, from tracking the transmission dynamics of the virus in Mexico to speeding the discovery of small molecules that could one day serve as pharmaceutical treatments for the disease. The C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, a research consortium established in March by enterprise AI software company C3.ai and headquartered at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, aims to mobilize AI, machine learning and the Internet of Things to transform societal-scale systems.

Alongside the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), IBM announced in March that it would help coordinate an effort to provide hundreds of petaflops of compute to scientists researching the coronavirus. As part of the newly launched COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium, IBM pledged to assist in evaluating proposals and to provide access to resources for projects that "make the most immediate impact." Much work remains, but some of the Consortium's most prominent members -- among them Microsoft, Intel, and Nvidia -- claim that progress is being made. Powerful computers allow researchers to undertake high volumes of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling, many of which would take months on traditional computing platforms (or years if done by hand). Moreover, because the computers are available in the cloud, they enable teams to collaborate from anywhere in the world. Insights generated by the experiments can help advance our understanding of key aspects of COVID-19, such as viral-human interaction, viral structure and function, small molecule design, drug repurposing, and patient trajectory and outcomes.

Asia is leading the pack in AI business deployment compared to less than a third for US companies. The adoption rate in the rest of the world remains low, as firms do not understand the deployment of AI¹ in their operations. The surveillance behavior of Chinese firms continues and contravenes privacy. MIT's decision to end its collaboration with iFlytek¹⁰ from China makes sense and will set the trend for other companies. Artificial intelligence does not have to hurt people but rather be ethical, responsible, and accountable.

A startup at a village in Kochi has developed an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ( UAV) drone supported with artificial intelligence that can help combat COVID-19 by monitoring body temperature, supplying essential commodities and spraying disinfectants. The unmanned'Garud' has been designed and engineered by AI Aerial Dynamics at the Maker village, which is India's largest electronic hardware incubator. The indigenously made drone can monitor roads and bylanes, besides residential pockets and aerodromes that have been locked down across the country since March 25 in an effort to check the spread of the deadly coronavirus. Also, the aerial vehicle can collect thermal data by using an array of IR sensors and advanced digital technology called EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution), thus working as a means to combating the pandemic. The vehicle can collect swabs and samples of people for COVID-19 test. It has the capacity to carry weight up to 60 kg, thus facilitating distribution of even essential commodities if there is an exigency.

Rabat – Moroccan-born professor of computer science at New York University (NYU) Dr. Anasse Bari has designed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to analyze and curb the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic. Managing a team of researchers at NYU, Bari helped create and study the efficacy of an AI instrument to predict patients vulnerable to coronavirus and determine the seriousness of COVID-19 infections. "Our goal was to design and deploy a decision-support tool using AI capabilities--mostly predictive analytics--to flag future clinical coronavirus severity," Bari said. "We hope that the tool, when fully developed, will be useful to physicians as they assess which moderately ill patients really need beds and who can safely go home, with hospital resources stretched thin," the computer scientist added, in light of the fact that hospital resources are limited as the COVID-19 outbreak continues. The Moroccan professor holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane (AUI), and is establishing negotiations between NYU and AUI to use the newly developed technology in tackling the spread of COVID-19 in Morocco.

As novel COVID-19 cases continue to rise at an alarming rate, predictions also paint a gloomy picture of the next months to come. Researchers worldwide are also going the extra mile to understand, mitigate, and restrain this deadly spread. In this blog, we have published about how AI applications are helping to manage global response; and we have mainly focused on three areas: individual patient diagnosis and treatment, protein and drug discovery, and the social-economic impact of coronavirus. When considering medical imaging, an AI model performs specific tasks; for example, analyzing CT lung scans more quickly and even more accurately than a medical professional. So, to combat the current pandemic, using machine learning (ML) approaches for fast-diagnostics can save many lives.