Taking a principled approach is crucial to the successful use of AI in pandemic management, say Stephen Cave and colleagues In a crisis such as the covid-19 pandemic, governments and health services must act quickly and decisively to stop the spread of the disease. Artificial intelligence (AI), which in this context largely means increasingly powerful data driven algorithms, can be an important part of that action—for example, by helping to track the progress of a virus or to prioritise scarce resources.1 To save lives it might be tempting to deploy these technologies at speed and scale. Deployment of AI can affect a wide range of fundamental values, however, such as autonomy, privacy, and fairness. AI is much more likely to be beneficial, even in urgent situations, if those commissioning, designing, and deploying it take a systematically ethical approach from the start. Ethics is about considering the potential harms and benefits of an action in a principled way. For a widely deployed technology, this will lay a foundation of trustworthiness on which to build. Ethical deployment requires consulting widely and openly; thinking deeply and broadly about potential impacts; and being transparent about goals being pursued, trade-offs being made, and values guiding these decisions. In a pandemic, such processes should be accelerated, but not abandoned. Otherwise, two main dangers arise: firstly, the benefits of the technology could be outweighed by harmful side effects, and secondly, public trust could be lost.2 The first danger is that the potential benefits increase the incentive to deploy AI systems rapidly and at scale, but also increase the importance of an ethical approach. The speed of development limits the time available to test and assess a new technology, while the scale of deployment increases any negative consequences. Without forethought, this can lead to problems, such …

Although there has been rapid growth in the levels of AI research to tackle COVID-19 since the beginning of the year, AI remains underrepresented in this area compared to its presence in research outside of COVID-19. After growing rapidly earlier in the year, the share of AI papers in COVID-19 research has stagnated in recent weeks. More than a third of publications to tackle COVID-19 involve predictive analyses of patient data and in particular medical scans. AI is also being deployed to analyse social media data, predict the spread of the disease and develop biomedical applications. China, the US, the UK, India and Canada are the global leaders in the development of AI applications to tackle COVID-19 research, accounting for 62 per cent of the institutional participations for which we have geographical data.

Machine learning can also help accelerate the discovery of drugs to help treat COVID-19. BenevolentAI, a UK AI company and AWS customer, turned its platform toward understanding the body's response to the coronavirus. They launched an investigation using their AI drug discovery platform to identify approved drugs which could potentially inhibit the progression of the novel coronavirus. They used machine learning to help derive contextual relationships between genes, diseases and drugs, leading to the proposal of a small number of drug compounds. In just days, BenevolentAI found that Baricitinib (a drug currently approved for rheumatoid arthritis, owned by Eli Lilly) proved the strongest candidate.

Today: Accelerating Medical and Drug Discovery To be sure, the quality of these tools and their promise varies, but given there is already reliance on AI to accelerate disease insights and drug development, we should be accelerating work on guardrails too. Among the bigger governance challenges is assessing the reliability, safety, and fairness of such tools. In many instances, a well-designed audit framework would enable leaders to evaluate whether the system is trustworthy but this can be challenging in practice. Tomorrow: Enabling Population Management and Limiting Disease Spread Tracking COVID-19 patients and their contacts is widely understood to be central to the effort to contain spread and eventually, loosen the restrictions on our mobility and economic activity. The AI/ML-enabled contact tracing tools that were so effective in Singapore and South Korea are now, in some form, likely coming to the EU and US.

How AI and data science are helping to understand and tackle the COVID-19 crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our daily lives in ways we could not have imagined just over a month ago. For many of us, our lives now happen within four walls. Around the world, restaurants, shops and theatres have been closed. Millions of people are in an increasingly precarious financial situation.

Kerala's experiments with cutting technology to simplify citizen services have always been much appreciated across the country, irrespective of the natural calamities it has seen in the past or the current global pandemic of the coronavirus that has taken the world into its grip. When the entire country is going through a tough time and complete government machinery is pressed into serviceto contain the dreaded coronavirus or Covid-19, Kerala Police is extensively using ICT to track people violating the 21 day lockdown and taking help of ultra modern gadgets to keep citizens inside their homes. From using drones to geofence-based home quarantine solution app to tele medicine platform, the Kerala government is not leaving any stone unturned to use technology optimally. Kerala Police has already hogged the limelight by making innovative videos on social media like the four'corona virus awareness videos' made by the Kerala police. All are innovative in-house creations of Kerala Police, where all the actors, directors and producers are police officers.