my colleague, lucy hockings, spoke to the ceo of bluedot, an intensive care doctor and to the chair ofiscuss the role of ai in the fight against covid—19. she began by asking the doctor about the moment he realised that covid—19 might have parallels with sars. we had been building at bluedot a digital early warning system for the last six and a half years, and we've been using artificial intelligence to extend our ability to pick up news about outbreaks at the earliest moment possible. what we learned during the sa rs outbreak, which is where i started my career here in toronto just before sars hit back in 2003, was that if we wait for official reports from government health agencies, we may not always get that information in the most timely manner, so we've been using online data from the world's media, health forums and blogs and a wide variety of other sources in 65 languages to monitor for early signals of outbreaks around the world and to process all that vast amount of data, to present the metaphorical needles in a haystack to our subject matter experts. so, we did that on the mo

my colleague, lucy hockings, spoke to the ceo of bluedot, dr kamran khan, myura nagendran, an intensiveof the uk government's ai council to discuss the role of ai in the fight against covid—i9. she began by asking dr khan about the moment he realised the wuhan outbreak might have parallels with sars. you know, this was on the morning of december 31. we had actually been, at bluedot, building what we call a digital early warning system for infectious diseases for the last six and a half years, and we've been using artificial intelligence to extend our ability to pick up news of outbreaks at the earliest moment possible. you know, what we learned during the sars outbreak, which is where i started my career here in toronto just before sars hit back in 2003, was that if we wait for official reports from government health agencies, we may not always get that information in the most timely manner, so we've been using online data from the world's media, health forums and blogs and a wide variety of other sources in 65 languages to monitor for early signals of outbreaks around the world and to

lucy hockings spoke to the ceo of blue dart, an intensive care doctor and to the chair of the uk government'st if we wait for official reports from government health agencies, we may not always get the information in the most timely manner, so we have been using online data from the well‘s media, health forums and blogs on a wide variety of other sources in 65 languages to monitorfor of other sources in 65 languages to monitor for early signals of outbreaks around the world and to process the vast amount of data to present the metaphorical needles in a haystack to our subject matter experts. we did that on the morning of december the 31st, and our platform also connects as you highlighted to the anonymous data on hundreds of millions of mobile devices and their locations as they move around the world as well as billions of passenger level flight itineraries. this is really so we can itineraries. this is really so we ca n start itineraries. this is really so we can start to get a step ahead and anticipate how an outbreak can spread across the planet. so detection of the first step, but how doe