IBM announced the allocation of pro bono resources, technologies and expertise to assist scientists, the health community and humanitarian organizations in the fight against the Zika virus.
IBM announced the allocation of pro bono resources, technologies and expertise to assist scientists, the health community and humanitarian organizations in the fight against the Zika virus.
As part of its Impact grant program, IBM will provide technologies and experts to the Brazilian Research Institute (Fiocruz) Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, one of the most prominent science and technology institutes in Latin America, working in collaboration with the Ministry of Health in Brazil.
Fiocruz plans to help monitor the spread of the Zika virus by using technology developed at IBM to analyze signs from information - from information published on social media to official information on travel patterns.
Researchers from IBM's research laboratories in San Jose, California and Brazil will train the institute's scientists in the use of STEM - Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler, software that enables the construction of models and visualization of the spread of diseases. STEM can help the public health system and epidemiologists analyze the effects of responses that take into account factors such as geographic area, weather, time, travel patterns, roads and airports.
Previous use of STEM software, developed by IBM and donated to the Eclipse Foundation, which promotes the use of open source technologies, was done to predict the spread of infectious diseases such as the Ebola virus, malaria and dengue fever.
As part of an IBM Impact grant, the company will work with Fircruz to identify and understand residents' concerns through an analysis of Twitter tweets in the Portuguese language, discussing the extent of Zika, Dengue and Chicogonia, as well as the emergence of the Egyptian Hades mosquito, strains responsible for the emergence of these diseases. After Fircruz scientists define the parameters of the study, IBM's research lab in Brazil will begin running IBM's cloud-based sentiment analysis technology to collect and interpret anonymized data. The report that IBM will produce will make it possible to produce recommendations for action directly to public health officials. A similar technology was used by IBM researchers in the World Cup competition, held in Brazil in 2014, by analyzing almost 60 million posts on social media. The researchers developed sophisticated algorithms to analyze large volumes of social media posts in near real-time.
In addition, IBM plans to donate to the American Foundation for UNICEF, a one-year subscription of weather data from The Weather Company, which was purchased by IBM. The information could be used for a better understanding of the spread of Zika, with a special focus on Brazil. More than 20,00 points for the weather forecast deployed in Brazil, will provide a daily basis for evaluating the spread of larvae.
These and other actions are added to OpenZika, which IBM announced about two months ago, an international research initiative of IBM's World Community Grid in collaboration with scientists from a number of leading universities, to identify possible cures for the Zika virus. In this framework, owners of a personal computer or an Android device donate the processing time of the device, while they do not need it, for the benefit of advancing research.
