Opinion | In a time of coronavirus, China’s investment in AI is paying off in a big way

In China, AI is being used to fight the virus on all fronts. With its ability to learn quickly, AI saves humans time in sequencing the genome of Sars-CoV-2, designing lab tests, analysing CAT scans and making new vaccines

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A robot checks visitors’ body temperatures at the entrance of a government building in Guangzhou. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 10:00am, 18 Mar 2020Updated: 1:01am, 19 Mar 2020

Artificial intelligence is typically presented in Hollywood movies as a human-hating robot in a doomsday scenario. However, in the current Covid-19 pandemic, AI has emerged as the superhero that is saving humanity from disease and greatly reducing the number of deaths globally.

AI researchers around the world have, over the past few years, engineered drastically new capabilities in health care, just in time to combat the novel coronavirus. This is particularly evident in China, where AI-related research and application development have grown substantially, especially since the announcement of the Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan in July 2017.

Since then, there have been major advancements in AI technologies, in areas including natural language processing, speech recognition, data analytics, machine learning and deep learning, and a wide range of applications from chatbots to facial recognition. These technologies have affected all industry sectors and are now being deployed as powerful weapons against Covid-19.

AI is being used to fight the virus on all fronts, from screening and diagnosis to containment and drug development.

With its ability to learn quickly from data relating to the novel coronavirus, AI saves human beings time in sequencing the genome of Sars-CoV-2, designing lab tests, analysing CAT scans and making new vaccines. In a pandemic, time is of the essence. Because Covid-19 cases increase exponentially, each day saved may mean hundreds or thousands of lives saved.

After severe acute respiratory syndrome broke out in late 2002, scientists had to wait months before they knew what the viral genome looked like. With the novel coronavirus Sars-CoV-2, Chinese scientists sequenced the genome using AI, published it and shared it with researchers around the world in early January, weeks after the first cases appeared in Wuhan.

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