ON NEW YEAR’S Eve of last year, the artificial intelligence platform BlueDot picked up an anomaly. It registered a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China. BlueDot, based in Toronto, Canada, uses natural language processing and machine learning to track, locate, and report on infectious disease spread. It sends out its alerts to a variety of clients, including health care, government, business, and public health bodies. It had spotted what would come to be known as Covid-19, nine days before the World Health Organization released its statement alerting people to the emergence of a novel coronavirus.

BlueDot’s role in spotting the outbreak was an early example of AI intervention. Artificial intelligence has already played a useful but fragmented role in many aspects of the global fight against the coronavirus. In the past months, AI has been used for prediction, screening, contact alerts, faster diagnosis, automated deliveries, and laboratory drug discovery.

Read the full article in Wired.