Wuhan Virus Detected by AI Epidemiologist

Quite interesting revelation.  The depth of this discovery still unclear.  Recall our work in detecting epidemics and bioterror by retail data.

AI Epidemiologist Sent First Warnings of Wuhan Virus in Wired via CACM   By Eric Niiler

Canadian health monitoring platform BlueDot was the first organization to alert its customers to the outbreak of coronavirus, on Dec. 31. BlueDot’s algorithm analyzes foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and governmental information in order to warn its clients to avoid dangerous regions where disease outbreaks appear to be occurring. The algorithm also considers global airline ticketing data, to help predict where and when infected residents are traveling. BlueDot correctly predicted the coronavirus would jump from Wuhan, China, to Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo in the days following its initial appearance. Said BlueDot CEO Kamran Khan, “What we have done is use natural language processing and machine learning to train this engine to recognize whether this is an outbreak of anthrax in Mongolia versus a reunion of the heavy metal band Anthrax.”