Hello, I'm Michelle Tapper with the Latest From Science. Artificial intelligence is being
used across the world to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic. From medical and hospital care,
to tracing and testing, AI is being used across a broad range of fields.
Here to tell us more about it is one of Australia's leading AI researchers and Academy Fellow
Professor Toby Walsh from UNSW Sydney and Data 61. Thanks for joining us today, Toby.
My pleasure.
As we know the race is on to find a COVID-19 vaccine, how is artificial intelligence being
used to help develop one? Well there's a good Australian success story
where there is already a team at Flinders University that has a vaccine that was found
with the help of an AI program that is being tested on animals as we speak. They had success
last year with an influenza vaccine and they've twisted now and they've been looking at the
COVID. It's two aspects of AI. One is that they use AI to work out what molecular structures
might be able to attack the virus. And then secondly, they use an AI program that tries
then to work out a new compound that will have those components and then they go off
in the lab and synthesise that. Tracing and tracking and maintaining physical
distancing are all important tools in managing this pandemic. What AI tools are being used
here and overseas to help fight the pandemic? So the very first idea that we might be suffering
this pandemic came from an AI program. It was developed by a Canadian company called
Blue Dot. And on December the 30th, nine days before WHO actually warned us that there was
this pandemic about to start, they were monitoring social media and the newswires. And they identified
that there was an unusual outbreak of pneumonia happening around the Wuhan region and sent
out to their clients a warning report. That was perhaps possibly the very first indication
that we had. And so those sorts of tools certainly I'm sure will be used to see if they can spot
any secondary outbreaks as we start to get on top of the virus.
As restrictions are being eased, what artificial intelligence tools are being used to monitor
outbreaks here and overseas? So I should start by saying this is a little
bit more controversial because we have to be obviously very careful about imposing on
people's privacy. But again, there's a team in South Australia that's building drones
and using computer vision to identify people who might be coughing in a crowd and also
reading their temperature using thermal sensors. And therefore you may be able to identify
people who need to be monitored. There are certainly a lot of interesting candidate Bluetooth
tools being being developed around the world. You can get a bracelet now that will tell
you if you've been close to someone else and you can use that to track and trace people
like you can with the COVIDSafe app as well. What sort of AI technology is being used to
help medical professionals on the front line? There's a wide variety of uses of AI already
on the front line to help deal with the COVID outbreak from helping the diagnosis. They've
already developed some tools in China to scan x-rays of people's lungs to identify the distinctive
signs of the beginnings of pneumonia in people's lungs and can do that quicker, more accurately
and cheaper than human doctors can do. So starting with the diagnosis and then moving
onto the treatment, there are AI programs, machine learning programs that have been developed
to identify those patients most at risk of having severe symptoms of the coronavirus
and those patients therefore needing the most care and attention. And towards then the care
of those patients, suggesting AI programs that have been used to suggest the best courses
of therapy for those people who are ending up sadly in ICU. Is AI being used to help
care for people that are contagious or perhaps give them medication so as not to infect medical
staff? So there's been very limited use of robots
within hospitals. There has been some trials of using robots so you can actually keep doctors
away from infected patients. The most widely used robots in Australia, in hospitals, are
those actually just dispensing drugs. Which is an interesting and challenging problem.
There are a huge number of people who get given the wrong prescription mistakes. And
so if you actually have a robot doing the dispensing, you can actually eliminate many
of those mistakes. But we will see robots being used increasingly in a care setting
and also not just in hospitals but also in aged care. But that comes with its own challenges.
I mean in terms of whether we'll actually remove humans and the caring touch that humans
provide to people, but equally that has to be balanced with keeping healthcare professionals
away from dangerous situations. There's loads of information coming in about
this pandemic, every minute of every day from all around the world. How is artificial intelligence
helping sort through all that information? I think this is a really good example of how
AI is going to change the way that we do science. The research into COVID is one of the most
active areas of research that we see today. And papers are being published around the
world. It's actually hard to keep on top of the literature. And so there's been a big
database collected together of all the publications in this area. And researchers are starting
to use AI tools, data mining tools to help mine that data to actually try and work out
the wood from the trees and see if there are interesting ideas that we can find because
it's almost impossible to keep up and read the papers, let alone do the research on the
topic. And so we're using increasingly AI tools to help us keep on top of the scientific
literature, in particular, on top of the COVID literature. But we'll see that in many other
areas moving forward, to keep on top of the literature of cancer or whatever, it's almost
impossible. You could spend your whole day just reading papers. And so increasingly AI
is going to help us speed up the way that we do science, the speed that we can do science.
How do you think AI research will change or improve as a result of this pandemic?
There's two ways in which AI, I think, is going to change as a result of this. First
of all, there's the big economic disruption that's happening to our lives. And as a response
that we come out of this, and as businesses start to transform themselves into the new
economic environment, increasingly they're going to turn to tools like artificial intelligence
and automation to help them become more economic and more viable. And secondly more specifically
we're going to see AI being increasingly used within medicine and healthcare. We see this
with COVID, but we're going to see this in many other areas that increasingly AI, one
of the good applications, one of the best applications, one of the most promising applications
for AI will be to actually help us understand our biology, understand our healthcare and
improve the quality of that. And in an age in which healthcare is ever increasingly expensive,
it's good to be able to have technologies like this coming along that will allow us
to offer better and better healthcare to more and more people. These tools can help us more
efficiently, more effectively, more cheaply track and trace when people have had the misfortune
to have caught the virus. But the best cure to the problem is not for people to get infected.
And the only way we can stop from being infected today, absence of a vaccine, is social distancing.
There's some great points there about artificial intelligence, and there's doubt it's an important
tool to help us manage and get through this pandemic. Thanks so much for your time today
Professor Toby Walsh. It's been my pleasure. And don't forget for regular video updates
from the Australian Academy of Science, make sure to follow us on social media. I'm Michelle
Tapper, see you soon.