My last column for 2019 was titled “Artificial intelligence will be more than just talk in 2020.” As I bid goodbye to 2020, allow me to close the year with the prediction that we would see AI go mainstream in 2021. In his December 21 Forbes website article, titled “Why Covid Will Make AI Go Mainstream In 2021,” data scientist Ganes Kesari predicts AI will transform 2021 by accelerating pharmaceutical drug discovery beyond Covid-19. He says the face of telecommuting would change, and that AI would transform edge computing and make devices around us truly intelligent.
A recent article on the Wiley Online Library website, titled “How artificial intelligence may help the Covid-19 pandemic: Pitfalls and lessons for the future” by Yashpal Singh Malik, et al., presents an overview of the prospective applications of the AI model systems in healthcare settings during the Covid-19 pandemic. In it, the authors highlighted the uses of AI-based approaches in healthcare during the pandemic where AI-based technologies and methods were deployed in modelling the virus spread and optimal utilization of resources. The “protein folding problem,” a grand challenge of biology that had puzzled scientists for 50 years, was solved through AlphaFold, an AI program developed by Google’s DeepMind. It’s a big deal for scientists developing a new drug because it helps them predict the protein’s shape that will help come up with a molecule that could bind to it, fitting into it to alter its behavior. AI also helped fast-track the coronavirus vaccine, cutting development to 10 months instead of years or decades. Malik and his co-authors agreed that “AI-based tools may not totally replace human brain in terms of observations made by virologists, epidemiologists or clinicians; however, the value of AI will play a significant and complementary role by reducing the burden on each stakeholder.”
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