Microsoft dedicates $20M from AI for Health program to COVID-19 data analysis
Microsoft says it’s immediately putting $20 million from its AI for Health program toward analytical tools that can help researchers and public health officials get a handle on the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’re focusing our efforts in five specific areas where we think data, analysis and the skills of our data scientists can have the biggest impact,” John Kahan, Microsoft’s chief data analytics officer, wrote today in a blog post about the effort. Those areas are:
- Data and insights relating to safety and economic impacts.
- Treatment and diagnostics, enabling research to further the development of vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics.
- Allocation of resources, including recommendations on the use of limited assets, such as hospital space and medical supplies.
- Dissemination of accurate information to counter misinformation.
- Scientific research to study and understand COVID-19..
Some of the money is going to support the recently announced COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which is marshaling supercomputers and cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure to support coronavirus research.
The beneficiaries aren’t limited to the United States: With support from Microsoft, a Brazilian venture called Take developed a chatbot to distribute information and connect potential patients to medical teams, to avoid overloading Brazilian hospitals. Closer to home, Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot has been adapted similarly for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Coronavirus Self-Checker.
April 10, 2020