Amii COVID-19 Efforts

Summary

The international AI/ML community has answered the call to mitigate the current and long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amii is committed to leveraging our resources, expertise, and community to serve this world-wide effort. At this time, we are dedicated to enabling world-changing machine intelligence, for good and for all, through research, advisement, and education opportunities in three areas of focus:

• Provide research and science expertise
• Amplify and contribute to high-impact initiatives
• Act as a catalyst for change, now and in the future

As Alberta navigates the near and long-term economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the state of our traditional economic drivers, Amii is committed to leveraging our resources, expertise, and community to advance Alberta’s economic recovery, and support initiatives in the BioTech and Life Sciences fields that are active in the fight against COVID-19.

We believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are part of the strategy for economic recovery from these crises, and will accelerate the diversification of the Alberta economy.

Initiatives

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning serve to de-risk priority projects, provide vital insights to high-impact strategy, and be applied as productivity solutions for complex problems facing our traditional and emerging industries. Presently, Amii is contributing to three high-impact initiatives: the Roche Data Science Coalition, the CODEVID-19 Hackathon and the CIFAR Coordinated National Approach.

Roche Data Science Coalition

An important element that contributes to the global fight against COVID-19 pandemic is through the sharing of knowledge and healthcare data to inform decision making. Amii has joined the Roche COVID-19 Data Science Coalition, alongside other dedicated public and private organizations such as NVIDIA, DOC.ai, Self Care Catalysts, Health Storylines, Vector Institute, ThinkData Works, and RGAX. The Coalition is focused on three key areas: patient support, insights into capacity issues, and research enhancement.

The group will look into twelve questions that have been vetted by healthcare workers at the frontlines, hospitals/clinics, supply chain partners and government:

1. Which populations are at risk for contracting COVID-19?
2. Which populations have contracted COVID-19 and require ventilators?
3. Which populations have contracted COVID-19 who require the ICU?
4. Which patient populations pass away from COVID-19?
5. Which populations assessed should stay home and which should see an HCP?
6. Which populations of clinicians and patients require protective equipment?
7. Which populations of clinicians are most likely to contract COVID-19?
8. How are patterns of care changing for current patients (i.e. cancer patients)?
9. What is the change in turnaround time for routine lab values for oncology patients?
10. What is the incidence of infection with coronavirus among cancer patients?
11. Are hospital resources being diverted from providing oncology care to support the COVID-19 response?
12. How is the implementation of existing strategies affecting the rates of COVID-19 infection?

The Coalition will also leverage Kaggle.com, the world’s largest online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners, through the UNCOVER Challenge (United Network for COVID Data Exploration and Research), exploring the same questions.

Amii will contribute by sitting on the expert working group, facilitating two whiteboard sessions for ideation, and offering scientist office hours to working group members.

For more information on Amii’s participation in the Coalition, visit kaggle.com/roche-data-science-coalition/uncover or Alberta joins global coalition against COVID-19

CODEVID-19

More than 1,500 developers and domain experts from 10 countries have joined a grass-roots hackathon to build rapid solutions to problems facing all citizens during the pandemic. Produced by the Dev Edmonton Society, Amii is providing educational webinars, led by Amii Scientists and Fellows, open to all participants with a priority focus on knowledge transfer by AI/ML in health experts.

Amii will contribute by delivering two educational seminars, offering scientist office hours to participants, and supporting outreach efforts.

For more information, visit codevid19.com or Together apart: Lending Amii’s AI expertise to CODEVID-19, the world’s first pandemic hackathon

CIFAR – A Coordinated National Approach

CIFAR, a Canadian-based global charitable organization that convenes extraordinary minds to address the most important questions facing science and humanity, has activated the anchor institutes of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy through a number of initiatives, task forces, and funding opportunities.

Cam Linke, Amii CEO, is participating in ongoing International Roundtables on AI and COVID-19 with a focus on data access and sharing. Reports from the discussions can be found at cifar.ca/action-on-covid19.

Amii Fellows are actively applying for targeted CIFAR funding for AI and COVID-19 interdisciplinary research collaborations to support innovating, high-risk/high-reward ideas and projects. 

In addition, AI Against COVID-19 Canada is a special task force aiming to map and coordinate AI projects in Canada that can contribute to solve the COVID-19 outbreak and limit its impact on society.

The task force is led by a community of researchers from CIFAR, Mila, the Vector Institute, and Amii. This site is an information-sharing platform and its goal is to stimulate new collaborations and data sharing among the institutes and external collaborators.

For more information, visit ai-against-covid.ca.

About Amii

One of Canada’s three centres of AI excellence as part of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, Amii (the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) is an Alberta-based non-profit institute that supports world-leading research in artificial intelligence and machine learning and translates scientific advancement into industry adoption. Amii grows AI capabilities through advancing leading-edge research, delivering exceptional educational offerings and providing business advice – all with the goal of building in-house AI capabilities. For more information, visit amii.ca.

Contact

Leadership and National Coordination:
Cam Linke, CEO
E: cam.linke@amii.ca

Industry Partnerships:
Christy Holtby, Managing Director – Investment
E: christy.holtby@amii.ca

Media Requests:
Spencer Murray, Director – Communications
E: spencer.murray@amii.ca | M: +1.780.991.7136