Covid-19 seemed to take everyone by surprise. Your new research project, AIOLOS, Artificial Intelligence Tools for Outbreak Detection and Response, could help to predict future pandemics. How does it work?
Caroline Weber: On a basic level, our aim is to collect data from many different sources and identify patterns that enable us to predict pandemics. The data could include mobility trends, public data and social media data, data from hospitals or medical research institutes. Ultimately, this could enable us to prevent another pandemic. Or at least minimise its impact by taking early measures.
Does anything like this exist already?
Max Haberstroh: Only partly. The idea itself isn’t new, but previous efforts have relied on either medical data or social data and didn´t combine the two. AILOS we not only combine data from many different sources but also bring together expertise from data science, medicine, and pharmacy – across academia and industry as well as from Germany and France. This willingness to match the complexity of the challenge is what gives us a real chance for success. It’s important to stress that this is a research project, though. There won’t be an industrial-ready tool at the end of it, but it could form the basis of one in the future.
Why hasn’t it been done before?
Max Haberstroh: For all the great things we hear about AI, people tend to forget that it starts with the availability of data. AIOLOS is just getting started and there are still a lot of question marks over exactly what kind of data we’ll be able to combine. Obviously, we have to consider things like data protection and privacy. But collaborating with such a broad cross-section of partners should help. The project is funded by the French and German governments, and we’re working with the Fraunhofer Institute for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology, CompuGroup Medical, an e-health company, Quinten Health, an expert in AI and medicine, and French pharma company Sanofi Pasteur. In addition, we already have a very interesting list of associated partners that expressed their interest in the project, and we are looking to get even more partners involved during the project.