Some estimates suggest that there is a one in four likelihood of another Covid-19-like outbreak occurring over the next ten years.
It might be a novel virus or one of the influenza or coronaviruses.
It’s a terrifying idea, as COVID-19, of course, killed and infected millions of people globally.
Can AI therefore aid in its alleviation?
Researchers in California are developing an artificial intelligence (AI) early warning system that looks through social media posts to help with pandemic prediction.
The Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention funding program of the US National Science Foundation includes researchers from the Universities of California, Irvine (UCI) and Los Angeles (UCLA).
The research that this supports has as its stated goal “to identify, model, predict, track, and mitigate the effects of future pandemics.”
In order to track public health trends, the initiative expands on past research by UCI and UCLA researchers, which included the creation of a searchable database of 2.3 billion US Twitter postings gathered since 2015.
Prof. Chen Li of the UCI Department of Computer Science is in charge of the project. He claims that over the previous five years, they have gathered billions of tweets on X, the platform that was formerly known as Twitter.