On the shores of Lake Ontario, a Canadian start-up raised one of the earliest alarms about the risk posed by the mystery virus that emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan. How did it do it? Artificial intelligence.
BlueDot has developed an algorithm that can sift through hundreds of thousands of news stories a day along with air traffic information in order to detect and monitor the spread of infectious diseases.
It sent an alert to clients on Dec. 31 last year about the new COVID-19 outbreak — a few days before major public health authorities made official statements. BlueDot, which is based in Toronto, also correctly predicted the countries in which the risk of contagion was most acute.
Photo: AFP
“What we are trying to do is to really push the boundaries — to be using data and analytics and technology to keep moving faster,” the company’s founder Kamran Khan said.
“Ultimately when you’re dealing with an outbreak, time and timing is everything.”
The 49-year-old Khan, an epidemiologist by training, first had the idea to launch BlueDot after the SARS epidemic of 2002-2003. At the time, Khan was a doctor specializing in infectious diseases at a Toronto hospital. He watched helplessly as the illness left 44 people dead in Canada’s largest city.
“A number of health care workers were infected including one of my colleagues. We had a number of health care workers who died,” he said. “This was a really eye-opening experience and was the motivation behind everything that we’re doing at BlueDot.”
65 LANGUAGES, 150 DISEASES
In 2014, Khan launched BlueDot, which now has 40 employees — a team of physicians, veterinarians, epidemiologists, data scientists and software developers.
Together, they thrashed out a real-time warning system based on natural language processing and machine learning.
Every 15 minutes around the clock, the company’s algorithm scans official reports, professional forums and online news sources, searching for key words and phrases.
It can read text in 65 languages and can track 150 different types of diseases.
“We call it the needles in the haystack,” Khan says. “There’s a massive amount of data and the machine is finding the needles and presenting it to the human experts,” who then review it and train the machine to understand if that information corresponds to an actual threat.
If it is credible, it is punched into a database that analyzes the location of the outbreak, nearby airports and commercial air travel itineraries from around the world.
Climate data, national health system databases and even the presence of mosquitoes or animals that transmit diseases to humans are also taken into account.
Once that analysis is complete, BlueDot sends an alert to its clients — government agencies, airlines, hospitals — where the majority of those airline passengers might land. The goal is to allow authorities to prepare for the worst: a major disease outbreak.
ELEMENTS ‘SIMILAR’ TO SARS
So on Dec. 31, in the early morning, the BlueDot system picked up an article in Mandarin that mentioned 27 people suffering from pneumonia, all linked to a wet market in Wuhan.
The virus was not yet identified, but the BlueDot algorithm noted two key phrases: “pneumonia” and “cause unknown.”
At 10am, a first alert went out to clients, notably in Asia.
“While we didn’t know this was going to become a big global outbreak, we did recognize that it had certain ingredients that were similar to what we saw during SARS,” Khan explained.
BlueDot also was able to predict that the virus was at risk of spreading from Wuhan to Bangkok, Taipei, Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong.
All of those places have since reported cases of the novel COVID-19, which has killed 2,000 people, almost all of them in China.
BlueDot already had a feather in its cap: in 2016, it predicted the spread of Zika from Brazil to south Florida.
“These viruses are complex and these diseases are complex, but we are continuously pushing the envelope in learning from each one of these outbreaks,” Khan said.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby