Artificial Intelligence and COVID-19

This past week, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) has organized a virtual conference on AI and COVID-19, a video of which is now available. Being unable to attend the conference, I have asked the organizers to share the following note with the participants:

Dear HAI Fellows,

I was unable to attend our virtual conference on “COVID-19 and AI”, but I feel an obligation to share with you a couple of ideas on how AI can offer new insights and new technologies to help in pandemic situations like the one we are facing.

I will describe them briefly below, with the hope that you can discuss them further with colleagues, students, and health-care agencies, whenever opportunities avail themselves.

1. Data interpreting vs. Data Fitting
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Much has been said about how ill-prepared our health-care system was/is to cope with catastrophic outbreaks like COVID-19. The ill-preparedness, however, was also a failure of information technology to keep track of and interpret the vast amount of data that have arrived from multiple heterogeneous sources, corrupted by noise and omission, some by sloppy collection and some by deliberate misreporting. AI is in a unique position to equip society with intelligent data-interpreting technology to cope with such situations.

Speaking from my narrow corner of causal inference research, a solid theoretical underpinning of this data fusion problem has been developed in the past decade (summarized in this PNAS paper https://ucla.in/2Jc1kdD), and is waiting to be operationalized by practicing professionals and information management organizations.

A system based on data fusion principles should be able to attribute disparities between Italy and China to differences in political leadership, reliability of tests and honesty in reporting, adjust for such difference and infer behavior in countries like Spain or the US.  AI is in a position to develop a data-interpreting technology on top of the data-fitting technology currently in use.

2. Personalized care and counterfactual analysis
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Much of current health-care methods and procedures are guided by population data, obtained from controlled or observational studies. However, the task of going from these data to the level of individual behavior requires counterfactual logic, such as the one formalized and “algorithmitized” by AI researchers in the past three decades.

One area where this development can assist the COVID-19 efforts concerns the question of prioritizing patients who are in “greatest need” for treatment, testing, or other scarce resources. “Need” is a counterfactual notion (i.e., invoking iff conditionals) that cannot be captured by statistical methods alone. A recently posted blog page https://ucla.in/39Ey8sU demonstrates in vivid colors how counterfactual analysis handles this prioritization problem.

Going beyond priority assignment, we should keep in mind that the entire enterprise known as “personalized medicine” and, more generally, any enterprise requiring inference from populations to individuals, rests on counterfactual analysis. AI now holds the most advanced tools for operationalizing this analysis.

Let us add these two methodological capabilities to the ones discussed in the virtual conference on “COVID-19 and AI.” AI should prepare society to cope with the next information tsunami.

Best wishes,

Judea

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