How Cloud AI helps during the COVID-19 season

For years, I have challenged the potential advocates of artificial intelligence: Before you turn to Cloud AI as a solution, find a specific problem to solve. Now that we are faced with a global pandemic, there is no shortage of complex, immediate problems that need to be addressed.

Everyone is coming together to take on the challenges Google faces due to the novel coronavirus, and AI is proving to be a valuable tool. From sifting through massive research datasets to finding potential treatments, to more accurately forecasting the spread of disease, to powering virtual agents To answer questions about COVID-19, AI is helping all types of organizations. In this post, we'll look at a few ways we're trying to help.

Find answers with the Kaggle Community

In March, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that it had 29,000 articles, which have now grown to more than 59,000, that may contain answers to key questions about the virus. It turned to Kaggle, a subsidiary of Google Cloud, to call on its community of more than 4 million data scientists to use AI to help find these answers. Participants developed several data and text mining tools to search through this dataset, named the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), to help answer questions. answer important questions like, What do we know about COVID-19 risk factors? What do we know about the genetics, origin and evolution of viruses?

That same week, Kaggle doubled down on its own efforts and challenged its community of data scientists to two forecasting competitions: One focused on forecasting the worldwide spread of COVID-19. world, the other predicts the spread of the disease in California.

Data scientists across the globe are collaborating to help the medical community defeat COVID-19, and you can stay up to date on our challenges at kaggle.com/covid19 and see the progress our community is making. I'm aiming to achieve the goals we've discussed here at kaggle.com/covid-19-contribution.

The virtual agent program responds quickly

In early April, we launched our Rapid Response Virtual Agent program to help organizations inundated with customer inquiries about the pandemic. The program helps businesses quickly build and deploy a customized Contact Center AI virtual agent to answer customer questions via chat or voice allowing customers to receive 24-hour support /7.

Albertsons Companies

“The pandemic has caused a number of inquiries from our customers, causing a flurry of calls and extremely long wait times. With the Responsive Virtual Agent program, we can quickly set up our virtual agents, answer questions, and direct traffic at the first request level. Saves us time and money, while better serving the needs of our customers.”

Cameron Craig, Vice President Digital Product, Design & Experience

Loan solution in the form of PPP

Last week, Google developed a PPP Lending AI Solution to help integrate Google's AI-based document entry tools into existing lending engines and underwriting systems to make they are more effective.

The PPP Lending AI Solution has three components, each of which can be used individually or in combination:

• Loan processing portal is a web-based application that allows loan agents and/or loan applicants to create, submit and view the status of their PPP loan application.
• The Document AI PPP Parser API allows lenders to use AI to extract structured information from form loan documents submitted by applicants. This component is available for free until June 30, 2020.
• Loan analysis allows lenders to quickly upload historical loan data, support de-identification and anonymization of sensitive information, securely store information, and perform data analytics on historical loan data this history.

We've always known that one of AI's great strengths is helping to solve complex problems, and with the pandemic we face a particular challenge. We will continue to build and deploy our AI capabilities to help during this time and help customers solve their toughest problems in the future.

Source: Gimasys