Basketball player Pau Gasol has signed the telecommunications engineer and doctor by the Media Lab of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Nuria Oliver, to chat on social media about the coronavirus. The athlete and the scientist from Alicante were not previously known but the Gasol Foundation team understood that Oliver's novel profile would provide an interesting perspective to the talks about the Covid-19 that the player is making through the Instagram application.

An unbeatable promotion for the newly appointed commissioner of the Presidency of the Generalitat for the Valencian Strategy for Artificial Intelligence. And it is that Oliver is immersed in conducting a macro-survey to try to extract data on social behavior during confinement, detect possible sources of contagion, the economic and labor impact of the health crisis, the state of mind of the population as well as the number of real infected.

Gasol has valued the work of the Valencian researcher and has worked as an interviewer, getting to transfer questions from the public. Both have even debated measures to combat the virus. The athlete has expressed his personal opinion that "until there are measures to test" most of the population "the social distancing will have to continue . " An idea that Oliver has nuanced. The scientist has warned that until there are vaccines there may be new waves but has wanted to distinguish between risk groups . Thus, he explained that not all people are "equally vulnerable or transmitting", so he understands that the relaxation of social distancing measures can be asymmetric. All in all, he commented that the lifting of the confinement will depend on the evolution of the epidemic.

Likewise, Oliver has indicated that a group of experts is working on a mobile application that could be very useful. The approach is simple. Each person would carry it on their device and it would record contacts with other phones, so that if one of the users tested positive for coronavirus, always preserving anonymity, the phones of those who had close contact with the infected would ring an alert. This would alert the user that they should take extreme measures and try to undergo tests to check whether or not they have the virus.

For more than half an hour, Gasol and Oliver have talked about how Artificial Intelligence can be applied to combat Covid-19. Likewise, the Commissioner of the Valencian Generalitat has explained to the basketball player some of the first conclusions of her macro study : 44% of those surveyed could be at home for one more month, while 30% could last three to six more months; 75% of those who have tested positive could identify the source of the contagion or 28% would not have the capacity to isolate themselves effectively in their homes. Oliver has argued that this data set "helps make better public decisions based on evidence."

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