Baidu Alibaba Cloud opens AI computing power to accelerate the research and development of new coronavirus drugs
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is being applied to the prevention and control of COVID-19.
On January 27, the "Zheli Office" APP launched a special platform for coping with COVID-19 - Zhejiang New Pneumonia Public Service and Management Platform. The platform can answer almost all epidemic problems in seconds, such as when to seek medical treatment, what are the designated hospitals in Zhejiang Province, how to select masks, how to check the airtightness of masks, and how to deal with the exhausted masks. The reporter from First Finance and Economics learned that the "intelligent epidemic robot" newly developed by Alibaba Dharma Institute provides services for the platform.
"With the current epidemic situation, there is a shortage of front-line personnel for prevention and control. How to rely on limited manpower to accurately and timely respond to public concerns and do a good job in front-line services is a matter of great concern to local governments." Zhao Kun, the project leader of intelligent epidemic robots and senior director of Alibaba Dharma Institute, said that after understanding this demand, the research and development team held an emergency teleconference on January 22, Dozens of engineers working at home actively participated in this public welfare project, worked overtime all night and launched an intelligent epidemic robot in five days.
With the help of the knowledge package provided by the health department, the team of the Dharma Institute let the robot learn the professional knowledge related to the epidemic. After several consecutive overnight tests and tuning, the robot has been able to answer most of the regular inquiries. In the background, robots work together with manual customer service, and problems that cannot be solved by robots are handed over to manual workers.
The Dharma Institute said that on the first day of its launch, the online intelligent consultation service of Zheli Office solved more than 92% of user inquiries. The Dharma Institute told China Business News: "The question answering robot mainly applies voice recognition, semantic understanding, natural language synthesis and other technologies."
In addition to building a public management platform, Alibaba Cloud's AI computing power has also begun to play a role.
On January 29, Alibaba Cloud announced that during the epidemic, it would open all AI computing power free of charge to global public scientific research institutions to accelerate the research and development of new drugs and vaccines for the COVID-19 epidemic.
During the research and development of new drugs and vaccines, a large amount of data analysis, large-scale literature screening and scientific supercomputing are required. Alibaba Cloud can provide powerful AI computing power, support virus gene sequencing, new drug research and development, protein screening and other work, and help scientific research institutions shorten the research and development cycle.
GHDDI, the global health drug research and development center, is cooperating with Alibaba Cloud to develop an artificial intelligence drug research and development and big data platform, to conduct data mining and integration for the historical drug research and development of coronaviruses such as SARS/MERS, to open relevant preclinical and clinical data resources, to calculate targets and drug molecular properties, and to follow up the latest scientific research trends of new coronaviruses, Real time disclosure to the scientific community and the public provides important data support for scientific research on COVID-19. At the same time, Alibaba Cloud and its partners will open relevant drug research and development resources to the global scientific community free of charge to jointly accelerate drug research and development for COVID-19.
Not only Alibaba Cloud, but also Baidu.
On January 30, Baidu Research Institute announced that it would open the linear time algorithm LinearFold and the world's fastest RNA structure prediction website for free to all gene detection institutions, epidemic prevention centers and scientific research centers around the world, so as to improve the prediction speed of the new coronavirus RNA spatial structure and help prevent and control the epidemic. Baidu Research Institute revealed that the LinearFold algorithm can shorten the prediction of the whole genome secondary structure of the new coronavirus from 55 minutes to 27 seconds, which is 120 times faster, saving two orders of magnitude of waiting time.
The LinearFold algorithm was first proposed by Baidu in July 2019. This algorithm makes it possible to predict the RNA structure of the whole sequence and genome, and is also the first major acceleration in the field of RNA structure prediction in 40 years.
Previously, Baidu also announced the establishment of a special fund for epidemic situation and public health security with a total scale of 300 million yuan to support a series of anti epidemic work such as screening, research and development of cure drugs for new diseases such as COVID-19. At the same time, we will provide artificial intelligence technology support, support billion level computing resources, and help research institutions such as disease control institutions and scientific research institutes to speed up research and development.
