Inspiration
The goal of the CoVIDathon is to do whatever we can to leverage the resources of the decentralized AI community to combat the COVID-19 virus and its various consequences.
Put more formally, the mission is: Developing and launching open-source code using AI and/or blockchain to combat COVID-19, reduce risk from future infectious outbreaks, and cope with the COVID-19 pandemic situation.
“It is imperative for those with AI expertise to help with the COVID-19 pandemic,” explains Dr. Ben Goertzel, AI pioneer, Chairman of DAIA and CEO of SingularityNET. “From aiding with biomedicine and epidemiology to ensuring that data privacy is respected as the pandemic is tracked and studied, to creating democratically-evolving tools for sharing information and helping people cope -- the number of ways AI can support in this unprecedented situation is vast.”
“The value of decentralized AI is especially powerful here, because only AI that's developed and deployed in a decentralized way puts the tools for combating COVID-19 in the hands of the affected people themselves,” adds Dr. Goertzel. “To provide what's needed on the time-scale demanded is going to require a coordinated effort across the AI development community which is why we’ve initiated COVIDathon.”
What it does
Assistive medical and research tools that can help collect, collate and be applied in the fight against Covid-19
There are four arenas in which participants can innovate upon:
- Medicine and Epidemiology
- Data Privacy and Sovereignty
- Informational and Coping Tools
- Open Innovation
How I built it
Our goal is to unite in the fight against COVID-19. Together we can develop and launch open-source code using AI and/or blockchain to combat COVID-19, reduce risks from future infectious outbreaks, and cope with the COVID-19 pandemic situation.
Read more here: https://github.com/skylinemarketing/covid19
Start contributing as a developer to Covid19 webapp? https://youtu.be/otuDhXWWnbw
Challenges I ran into
Data is all-important in researching and solving Covid-19, can we get access to the data needed while protecting individuals rights?
Decentralized AI Alliance (DAIA), an organization of more than 50 companies, labs, and nonprofits, will host the event, which aims to develop and launch open-source code and tools that can be leveraged by the medical community in their fight against COVID.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Covid-19 has led to huge changes in the way people live, what tools can be developed to ease the effects of this?
The Algorand Foundation launched a health survey website to record public health trends during the novel coronavirus pandemic.
The site allows infected people to record their experiences anonymously, and will use the Algorand blockchain to protect the data for posterity.
Called the iReport-Covid app, the idea is to “get health data from more sources than just government authorities,” said Hugo Krawczyk, Algorand Foundation researcher.
“We think blockchains are a good way of recording information and it’s accessible if you want to do statistics...if in 10 years you want to research the virus you will have this data available,” he said.
What I learned
Building privacy-centric solutions for CoVID19 using AI & Blockchain technologies is bringing together global AI and blockchain projects and developers to create intelligent decentralized tools to combat COVID-19 and to reduce risks from future infectious outbreaks.
What's next for EU vs. Virus
COVID-19 has disrupted the lives of millions, starting in China, and expanding worldwide. The global economy continues to be seriously impacted, as well as routine social activity. The majority of reports state that with or without travel bans, social distancing and other measures, the virus and its effects will continue to proliferate for weeks, most likely for months to come. Important resources are currently being used in the development and testing for a vaccine which will likely continue for the next 12 to 18 months.
While China has fairly effectively used its centralized power to provide medical data to research institutes and location data of its citizens to track down the virus, China’s centralized control of information dissemination was also partly responsible for the speed of spread of the virus in its early days. Conversely, other nations such as the US which have responded to COVID-19 in a more localized and distributed manner have been slowed and hampered by lack of effective decentralized methods for coordination and information dissemination. We propose to use cutting-edge decentralized technology to provide more effective ways of addressing the multiple problems associated with tracking, controlling, understanding and ultimately curing pandemics. Due to time sensitivity, the most applicable and scalable solutions will be made public to support the general scientific community. Like most things in life, the extremely unfortunate medical crisis that currently confronts the human species can be expected to have its upsides along with its downsides. One of the few positive things about crisis situations is the potential they have to bring people together.
It is a rare moment when a large portion of humanity’s resources is focused on the same problem. We believe that decentralized AI, even in its current early stage of development, is an extremely valuable resource, and we would like to see it deployed as effectively as possible to get humanity beyond the COVID-19 crisis and on to its next stage of development.
Some of the tools and collaborations formed in this process will be valuable not only for combating COVID-19 but also for a variety of humanitarian, technological and scientific purposes after COVID-19 has been relegated to the role of “just one more disease basically under control.”
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