Context While the world’s ongoing COVID-19 experience has underscored the need to strengthen pandemic readiness and resilience through always-on infectious disease intelligence, significant barriers exist. Despite strong intentions and substantial progress, many governments and international institutions often lack the data, analytical capabilities and resources to detect, understand and respond to infectious disease threats in a timely, effective and coordinated manner. The AI solution Long before COVID-19, Toronto-based BlueDot understood that international travel, mass gatherings, urbanization, ecosystem disruption, climate change and other global forces were driving outbreaks with increasing frequency and scale. This inspired BlueDot’s global surveillance engine, which uses language models and machine learning (ML) to track infectious disease activity worldwide from official and unofficial sources in 132 languages. This engine empowers organizations with around-the-clock global situational awareness of unusual syndromes and high-consequence pathogens without relying on official government sources that can be incomplete and lack timeliness. Sources include media reports, air travel patterns, genomic sequencing, mosquito patterns, social traffic, search queries and even potentially sewer data. Yet, timely awareness of global threats is not enough. BlueDot draws from an expansive set of global data sources complemented by its in-house subject matter and data science experts to understand local conditions at the epicentre of a threat, including estimating the true burden of disease to overcome incomplete reporting, operationalizing predictive models to forecast domestic and international patterns of spread, and identifying where global population and environmental conditions are vulnerable to secondary outbreaks. Impact BlueDot gained international recognition after alerting its public- and private-sector clients of an unusual respiratory illness on 31 December 2019 – one week before the World Health Organization announced the emergence of a novel coronavirus – and for accurately forecasting its global spread in the world’s first peer-reviewed COVID-19 study. When BlueDot first alerted Air Canada of COVID-19, the organization launched a series of industry-leading interventions to help keep its travellers and employees safe. BlueDot also partners with public entities, including public health organizations and cities such as Chicago. Other examples of BlueDot interventions include detecting and tracking monkeypox outbreaks in 2022 and recommending actions the public and public health agencies should and shouldn’t take. BlueDot continues to model the effects of climate change on mosquito patterns to understand future outbreaks of diseases like chikungunya, dengue, yellow fever and Zika. CA S E S T UDY 4 Biothreat intelligence company BlueDot uses AI to detect outbreaks earlier and predict their future course We just don’t have good systems for detecting many diseases in many parts of the world. Building predictive models and validating them is hard work, but what we’re focused on now is turning actionable intelligence into real world action. Because we understand that influencing human behavior is the hardest part. Kamran Khan, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, BlueDot Scaling Smart Solutions with AI in Health: Unlocking Impact on High-Potential Use Cases 17
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