On Tuesday April 28th Neil Jacobstein, mediaX Distinguished Visiting Scholar and chair of the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University hosted the third webinar in the mediaX series “Thinking Tools for Wicked Problems”.

The COVID-19 Pandemic has revealed how brittle and poorly prepared the global community was for pandemic. This continues to be a harsh lesson, and it could have been much worse. The task ahead is to respond to and overcome the current COVID-19 pandemic, and then build a more robust and resilient public health system to be better prepared for the next crisis. While there are many political, economic, and social elements to building a stronger public health system, technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics can amplify our resilience considerably.

Neil’s webinar covers some of the current uses of AI in addressing COVID-19, focusing on large scale collaborations such as the XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance, the Kaggle COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge, and many team efforts to develop drugs and vaccines. Included in this are these three takeaways.

1. AI and robotics are already delivering significant value in combating pandemic disease.
2. International collaboration on machine learning datasets and open source robotic designs are accelerating progress.
3. AI and robotics can decrease cost, increase effectiveness, accelerate solutions, and save lives in the current COVID-19 pandemic, and the public health crises to come.

Please enjoy the highlights of this webinar.