It has been 6-months since COVID-19 took China by storm, infecting at least 85,000 people in that country and more than 14-million others around the world. In March, China’s richest man and the founder of the Alibaba Group, Jack Ma, released a ‘handbook of treatment and care protocols’ for healthcare providers developed by front line workers who had faced the pandemic in China head-on. The free handbook was published on Ma’s Alibaba platform as well as his new Twitter account, with a tweet warning that “hospitals in outbreak countries will face huge challenges in coping with the surge of patients.”
Less than a month later Ma announced another handbook on his Twitter account, titled ‘Hospital Response Strategy’, and used the hashtag #oneworldonefight to describe his desire to assist other nations in their fight against the crippling pandemic sweeping the globe. He has since tweeted about donations of ventilators, face shields, thermometers, swabs, and gloves that the Jack Ma Foundation made to the U.S., Europe, and Africa. Ma recently pledged to provide 100-million additional masks, as well as 1-million N95 masks and test kits, to the World Health Organization to be distributed as needed.
It is not just Ma and his Foundation that are working on building solutions to support those suffering in the pandemic. Alibaba Cloud details products that were built on its Cloud platform to assist in the fight against COVID-19 in a recent white paper.
The paper includes detail on CT Imaging Analytics, which claims it can predict the probability of COVID-19 pneumonia with an accuracy of 96% in just 3-4 seconds. This is 60 times faster than the 5-15 minutes it takes a doctor to interpret the 300 images needed to make a COVID-19 pneumonia diagnosis, according to the company. CT Imaging Analytics claims that 170 Chinese hospitals are now using the technology and that 13,000 CT images are analyzed each day. It is unclear if these claims have been scientifically verified by an independent third-party or have gone through peer review.
CT Imaging Analytics says it uses technology powered by deep learning algorithms to assess a patient’s condition, and can rapidly determine the difference between common pneumonia and COVID-19 pneumonia. The platform analyzes and trains on CT images to provide doctors with a fast diagnosis that can also detect the presence of lesions masks and the affected lung volume ratio.
CT Imaging was developed through Alibaba’s ‘Global MediXchange for Combating COVID-19’ (GMCC) program which aims to fight the global outbreak of the novel coronavirus by using “cutting-edge anti-epidemic technologies.” GMCC teamed up with the Alibaba DAMO Academy — which builds high-impact AI technologies to empower the core business of Alibaba and create new business opportunities that are otherwise impossible. The DAMO Academy provided CT Imaging Analytics with AI algorithmic services to make the patient diagnosis possible. Alibaba says its algorithm was trained on 5,000 CT images and deployed in the emergency hospital that was rapidly built to treat COVID-19 patients in Zhengzhou.
The ‘Alibaba Cloud helps fight COVID-19 through Technology’ white paper also discusses a platform that was created for physicians to share information on preventing and controlling COVID-19. The International Medical Expert Communication Center (IMCC) is designed to connect medical workers that are spread across different regions and countries using video conferencing and multi-language communication tools. The information exchange platform works in real-time to provide physicians in other countries with knowledge and insight on the pandemic.
IMCC was developed in conjunction with Alibaba’s DingTalk – a work productivity tool that is similar to Slack. DingTalk was launched to compete with Alibaba rival Tencent’s exceptionally popular social platform WeChat. Throughout the pandemic DingTalk has evolved to also be used in education, keeping students accountable for the time they spend on schoolwork online. The company says the free online classroom is now being used by 120-million students in China, and 140,000 schools. DingTalk is also now making video-conferencing and live streaming features free to its 10-million enterprise customers to assist in connecting people during the pandemic.
Alibaba has also helped to develop a sophisticated prediction tool to aid in the response to COVID-19. According to the Alibaba Cloud website, the Epidemic Prediction Technology platform helps estimate epidemic characteristics including size, peak time, spread within specific regions, sensitivity, and predictions on whether patients have active infections, are cured, deceased, or have critical cases. It is designed to help public health departments make decisions and understand the impact of the epidemic on the community. The technology uses deep learning and is said to have 98% prediction accuracy, according to data procured in China.
Other platforms built with Alibaba Cloud include Whole Genome Sequencing Analysis that reduces testing time and false-negative results, and Data V, a data visualization tool. Alibaba notes that the business impact of coronavirus has been felt across many sectors and that education, retail, logistics, finance, entertainment, transportation, and manufacturing have been hit particularly hard and need solutions. The company says it is offering tailored cloud solutions to organizations to support them as they address challenges and the economic repercussions of the pandemic, in addition to providing PPE and medical equipment donations to countries across the globe.
While no longer CEO and Chairman of Alibaba, founder Ma is now dedicating his time to philanthropy and has become an international figurehead and thought leader on technology and AI. With one hugely successful IPO already under his belt, Ma’s payment venture AliPay, rebranded as Ant Financial Group, is set to go public in dual listings later this year. It should be said that all of the positive press from being a solutions-oriented, global-minded savior in a pandemic is a highly strategic way to define the public narrative in the lead up to an IPO.
That being said, however, it is clear Ma is dedicated to the causes that he believes in. He and Melinda Gates are co-chairs of the United Nations High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation that aims to bring people together across domains and borders to “realize the transformational potential of digital technologies.” He speaks often at Davos and other prestigious conferences on the role AI will play in the future and the superiority of humans over machines.
Earlier this month, Ma spoke at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai and declared that although “the big trends in digital technology have not changed,” he believes that digital adoption has been sped up by between 10 and 20 years because of COVID-19. Appearing as a hologram on stage, Ma reiterated his commitment to #oneworldonefight, and reminded the socially-distanced crowd that “viruses don’t need visas.”
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