Scientists are working on training an artificial intelligence system, using mobile phone data and satellite imagery, to achieve better coordination of relief efforts in poor countries suffering from the spread of the "Covid-19" pandemic.
The project aims to identify people who urgently need relief through their mobile phones, and to monitor the symptoms of the economic crisis or the spread of the virus.
"The new method will allow relief workers on the ground to better set their priorities and tasks," Joshua Blumenestek, from the University of California Berkeley, was quoted by TechExplore as saying.
It appears that the efforts of Blumentic and all of his colleagues, in coordination with a number of governments in poor countries, such as Togo and Bangladesh, to improve relief efforts, may subject the residents of those countries to levels of control that may violate privacy, despite the fact that Blumentic emphasizes its goodwill and nobility of its goal in accurately identifying affected people, And get aid to them quickly.
"In Togo, they have a social protection program based on traditional data recording, which is an impressive system, but they are concerned about its inability to register everyone, so they asked us to help us identify the dropouts from registration, by relying on mobile data and satellite pictures," Blumenstik said. .
Blumentic knows that technical solutions are not a magic wand. Scientists cannot train the algorithm to take pictures, analyze and solve the problem easily, but he adds: “The quality of the new algorithm models depends on the quality of the data used in their training, and it is not intended to replace traditional forms of measurement, such as evidence-based evidence Survey data, but rather its completion. ”
Technical solutions are not a magic wand, as scientists cannot train the algorithm to take pictures.