ANALYTICS

Fighting Coronavirus with Big

Data
by Julie Shah and Neel Shah
April 06, 2020

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One of us (Julie) is an AI researcher and a roboticist at MIT. The other
(Neel) is a physician at a major hospital and a public health researcher at
Harvard. Our dinnertime conversations tend to focus on the future. Lately,
unsurprisingly, they’ve become hushed and grim.

Amid the daily news churn, policy makers seem to be facing an impossible
choice between saving lives and saving livelihoods. A close study of
cautionary tales and hopeful examples from across the globe makes clear
that social distancing, sheltering in place, and other mitigation efforts are
critical to blunting the impact of the pandemic, despite the havoc they
wreak on daily routines and markets. However, we know that the sooner
we can return to safely congregating, the better.

How can we get there? We believe the answer lies in computation. We need
to put as much data and computing power into the problem as we can, and
now. Here’s a hopeful scenario we’ve discussed, one we believe could, with
focused effort, be operational by summer.

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to ramp them up as quickly as possible. We also need adequate supplies of
personal protective equipment for health care workers and others on the
front lines, along with ventilators and other lifesaving treatments. Putting
those things in place, in combination with the mitigation measures
currently being deployed, including lock downs of entire states, will buy us
critical make-up time for deploying data and computers against the virus.

The next step is developing smart prevention capabilities rather than

requiring blanket isolation and shutdowns. Our window is short —
measured in months — for heading off what Bill Gates has characterized as
potentially a once-in-a-century pandemic like the 1918 Spanish Flu, which
killed at least 50 million people around the world. We have many
technological advantages over those fighting that pandemic a century ago.
In many ways, this is our most meaningful Big Data and analytics challenge
so far. With will and innovation, we could rapidly forecast the spread of the
virus not only at a population level but also, and necessarily, at a hyper-
local, neighborhood level.

At MIT, efforts are underway to use existing mobile technologies to quickly

develop game-changing, privacy-preserving contact tracing. When
someone tests positive for COVID-19, health care providers could
download the names of those who were in close proximity to the infected
individual during the relevant time frame without accessing their comings
and goings. With that anchoring information, computer scientists could
then integrate data from a broad swath of sources — possibly including the
amount of virus in wastewater  — to forecast precise community-level
infection risks.

That data would allow more-dynamic risk assessments, sufficiently precise

and current to allow us to decide not whether schools and workplaces
should be open but which ones should be open, and for how long. Air traffic
controllers harness computing to coordinate the use of airspace in the face
of uncertain weather patterns. A high viral-risk day for a specific locale
could be the epidemic equivalent of a storm warning.
Such targeted isolation strategies would allow many more schools and
businesses to stay open, which would be good. It would create challenges,
too. Starting and stopping operations on the basis of current risk is not
trivial; it can wreak havoc on supply chains and daily routines. Computing
technology could make the process less disruptive and help ensure that we
meet procurement needs and preserve workforce continuity. Logistics and
transportation companies such as FedEx use human-artificial intelligence
collaborations to plan their supply chains according to factors including
predicted demand and transportation costs; similar collaborations could be
deployed to improve the flexibility of our workplaces and schools.

Adapting such measures to fight the pandemic might teach us that physical
presence is not always as necessary as we had thought. Remote work may
simply become part of how we think about work. Here, too, computing
could allow us to finely weigh the risks and benefits of having people work
alongside one another. Much as sports franchises have used advanced
analytics to compose their rosters, businesses and other organizations
could develop metrics to team people up in risk-informed ways. New
human-robot interface technologies, which allow users to communicate
with robots that are stocking supplies, cleaning, or assembling equipment,
effectively allow people to collaborate with machines as if working with
human partners. The increasing availability of smart virtual-collaboration
tools and intelligent collaborative robots in industrial spaces will be game-
changers for remote work.

Amid an unprecedented pandemic and facing an uncertain future, we’re all

adjusting to rapid and drastic changes to our daily lives. As the tumbling
markets indicate, the pace of change is straining the well-oiled operations
and infrastructure that hold society together. Hard though it may be, we
innovators must wrench ourselves away from the operational details of
managing these hardships and look unflinchingly forward. We need to not
only soften the blow of curtailed timelines and busted budgets but
fundamentally redesign the way essential services are delivered and
preserve the functions of society. We have the people. We have the data. We
have the computational force. We need to deploy them now.

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Julie Shah is an AI researcher and roboticist, and associate dean of social and ethical
responsibilities of computing at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

Neel Shah is a physician and public health researcher, and Director of the Delivery
Decisions Initiative at Ariadne Labs: a joint center for health system innovation at Brigham &
Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

This article is about ANALYTICS

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