Technology Giants Rush To Help: Fight A New "War Epidemic"

The number of confirmed cases of pneumonia caused by new coronavirus is increasing every day. No one can give a definite time to the epidemic inflection point that people expect. The time of office workers' return is pushed and pushed again. People hope to fight quickly with the epidemic situation, but this is undoubtedly a protracted war.

In this case, more forces are needed to join the battle. Over the past few years, in the coverage of technology companies, the importance of ABC (artificial intelligence, big data, Cloud Computing) technology has been repeatedly mentioned. The changes brought about by these technological capabilities are obvious to all. So what role can ABC technology play in this situation of the whole nation and the whole nation's "war epidemic"?

In January 27th, the Ministry of industry and information technology established an expert group on epidemic prevention and control. The expert group consists of two academicians of the Chinese Academy of engineering, Wu Hequan and Wu Jianping. It is reported that the Ministry of industry established the expert group, which aims to support the epidemic situation diagnosis, epidemic prevention and control deployment, as well as the monitoring and precise implementation of mobile epidemic situation through big data analysis.

In February 4th, the Ministry of industry and Commerce issued a proposal to urge the AI Association, alliance, enterprises and institutions to further exert the effectiveness of artificial intelligence empowerment, organize research and production forces, and accelerate the effective tackling and application of related products in the prevention and control of epidemic diseases.

On the same day, the Zhongguancun administrative committee released the list of the first batch of new technologies, new products and new services to fight the epidemic. The list includes 138 new technologies, new products and services from 86 enterprises in Zhongguancun, covering various aspects related to the fight against the epidemic, including virus detection, vaccine research and development, clinical treatment, medical protection, intelligent diagnosis, epidemic analysis and release, and most of these technology products and services are relatively mature and can be put into operation immediately.

In fact, according to the twenty-first Century economic report, many technology giants including Alibaba, Tencent and others have been taking action, and constantly exported their technological capabilities around the outbreak of the epidemic.

A research and development staff member who participated in the fight against epidemic projects told reporters that although they could not rush to the front line like medical staff, they also hoped to accelerate the end of the battle through the application of these new technologies.

Time is life.

Reporters learned from Tencent that in January 24th, Tencent cloud provided a batch of GPU cloud servers free of charge to the team of Professor Luo Haibin of Zhongshan University School of pharmacy, helping the team to promote the screening of viral drugs.

At the same time, Tencent cloud also provided a large number of standard CPU computing power and object storage capacity to the Beijing Life Sciences Institute / Tsinghua University biomedical research institute, helping them conduct off-line calculation of gene computation.

Taking the virtual screening of compounds based on the new coronavirus target structure as an example, Professor Huang's principle is to let drugs interact with biological targets in vivo. Therefore, screening and designing small molecular ligands based on drug target structure will greatly reduce the cost and cycle of the initial research and development of innovative drugs.

Computing is the strength of cloud services, and its high-performance computing power can help the laboratory quickly screen hundreds of millions of compounds database, thereby speeding up the research of new coronavirus.

In February 1st, good news came from Zhejiang CDC. The AI algorithm of Alibaba realized landing application. The Zhejiang Provincial Center for Disease Control and control launched an automated genome wide analysis platform on the same day. The platform, using the AI algorithm developed by the hospital, shortened the genetic analysis of suspected cases to half an hour in the past few hours.

It is reported that Zhejiang's online genome testing and analysis platform is jointly developed by Zhejiang Provincial Center for Disease Control and prevention, Ali Damour medical AI team and Jie Yi Biotech Corp. Different from the commonly used nucleic acid detection methods in hospitals at present, the platform adopts genome wide detection technology, and can complete genome sequence analysis and comparison of virus samples of suspected cases.

Gu Fei, an algorithm expert at the hospital, told the twenty-first Century economic report that the whole detection process included sampling, database building and data analysis. Among them, AI mainly improved the efficiency of the analysis.

Specifically, each sequence process produces huge amounts of data, and these data analysis is completed by the Damour algorithm. Based on a series of optimization algorithms, the detection speed of sample cases can be accelerated.

Gu Fei further said that this analysis of virus detection and virus mutation is based on the open source algorithm and the distributed algorithm to accelerate the analysis process. After the completion of the virus sequence, the BiLSTM+DNN model was designed to predict the two level structure of the viral protein.

Reporters learned from the Alibaba that after the outbreak, Gu Fei immediately rushed to the Zhejiang Provincial Center for Disease Control and began to analyze the characteristics of the new coronavirus gene, and launched a number of algorithm models. In addition to Gu Fei, there are more than 10 experts in the Arito chamber support.

Technology company aggregation

In the list of new technologies, new products and new services launched by the Zhongguancun administrative committee, the reporter saw many famous Internet Co.

For example, byte beating, Sogou, Jin Shanyun and so on appear in the big data cloud computing service epidemic protection category, dripping trip, the United States and other groups appear in the Internet to enhance the life services category, Lenovo and so on appear in the hospital construction protection category, open vision technology and so on appear in the category of medicine and equipment.

Internet Co has covered hundreds of millions of user groups. When the outbreak came, they also launched various activities other than donations in their respective business areas.

For example, the "pneumonia prevention" channel launched by the fast hand in January 22nd, as of January 31st, has exceeded 3 billion hits. Among them, the three central media and the national media, represented by Xinhua news agency, people's daily and CCTV news, carried out a number of live broadcast of the epidemic on the fast hand, totaling over 1 billion people.

The "fight against pneumonia" channel, which was launched in January 23rd today, has an average of more than 80 million users per day in January 31st. It is concerned about the information on the prevention and control of pneumonia, and has read more than 1 billion 350 million times a day.

In addition, AI company, represented by open technology, is also introducing a solution to fight the epidemic. Reporters learned that recently, the nearly 100 research team of Kuang Shi technology has been formally launched on the AI temperature measurement system after ten days of struggle, and has already launched a pilot application in the Haidian government hall and some Haidian District subway stations.

The AI temperature measurement system can identify the high temperature personnel in the stream through the front end infrared camera, and then according to the human body and face information of the suspected fever, through the pedestrian re recognition technology, it can assist the staff of three stations (a train station, a bus station, a subway station, an airport, etc.) to find the fever quickly.

Compared with the artificial close range detection method and the traditional fever screening system, the AI temperature measurement system can not only effectively prevent the spread of the epidemic, but also reduce the interference to the public and improve the efficiency of the traffic.

The head of science and technology told reporters that the AI temperature measurement system has optimized the mask model for mask wearing. Even when masks and hats cover a large area of face, the system can help workers quickly screen the crowd, and the recognition error is + 0.03 degrees.

Last year, Tencent updated the company's mission vision and put emphasis on technology and goodness. In fact, in addition to Tencent, many companies have put forward similar views, and technology to be good is a subjective choice, reflecting the value of a company's technology strength.

But when faced with the same difficulties as the pneumonia epidemic, technology can do more than help, but save lives. Let more people get popular science, speed up the efficiency of social operation, and let the scientific research team break the new coronavirus one day, which can save more lives. This is the responsibility of science and technology, and is also the direction for technology companies to strive for.

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