John Davidson* says artificial intelligence tools are being refashioned to help with the global health crisis.
Photo: Unleash Live
Artificial intelligence (AI) bots that could help police departments enforce social distancing and help medical experts trace the contacts of people who have been in contact with the coronavirus could be up and running within hours or days, companies that make the bots say.
Artificial intelligence tools that up until recently were used for crowd control at music festivals, or that helped businesses automate their accounting paperwork, are now being refashioned to help with the global health crisis.
AI startup Unleash Live, which makes artificial intelligence software programs, analysed live video feeds of crowds and pedestrians walking down streets.
The Sydney-based company says it has now tweaked those programs, also known as AI bots, to send out alerts whenever crowd densities go above a certain number of people per square metre.
Meanwhile, Automation Anywhere, which makes “Robotic Process Automation” software that automates mundane business tasks, says it has been working with governments in Asia to create bots that automate the processing of information about the whereabouts of people who either have the novel coronavirus or who have been in contact with people who have the virus.
Like a lot of businesses that are weighing in on the crisis, it’s not about new business opportunities so much as it’s about helping customers survive the pandemic, the companies say.
“It’s not us looking for more business,” Adrian Jones, Automation Anywhere’s regional executive vice president, told the The Australian Financial Review.
“It’s us trying to speed up processes to help.”
“We’ve had many inbound approaches saying, ‘Hey, can we somehow use video to manage the crisis’,” said Hanno Blankenstein, Unleash Live chief executive and founder.
Unleash Live’s cloud-based platform takes live video feeds coming from security cameras or from asset management cameras in large companies such as gas utilities, and then applies machine learning techniques to those feeds, to provide real-time information about what’s going on in the video.
That information can then show up on a management console or it can be used to send out alerts to workers whenever the data exceeds some threshold.
Earlier this month, the company rewrote one of its AI bots to check for social distancing, and police departments in the US and elsewhere are looking into deploying it on their existing video surveillance systems.
The company was making it free for 14 days.
“Some [police departments] are saying, ‘This is putting our field officers out of harm’s way’ so they’re interested,” Mr Blankenstein said.
“And others are evaluating whether AI freaks them out.”
After the free period is over, the social distancing bots are one of Unleash Live’s pricier bots to operate.
Analysing the feed from 10 security cameras, and providing alerts whenever crowds get too large or too dense, will cost A$15,690 a month.
“It’s not a lot compared to the alternative, but it’s a specific use case where you run 24-hour AI on your cameras,” Mr Blankenstein said.
“That’s a lot of processing.”
It might be a lot of processing, but it’s not a lot of work to implement.
Organisations that have existing camera networks can simply divert the output of their cameras to the Unleash Live platform — a process that can be simply adding a new internet address to the video’s list of recipients — and new cameras can be added in just minutes, officials say.
Other AI bots, too, are coming to the fore in the crisis, when governments and companies are reluctant to send out workers to do things like checking on oil and gas pipelines.
“Oil and gas companies that previously thought they liked the idea of using live video to do remote inspections of their assets and saving their team from having to travel, now they’re saying to us, this is how we have to do it,” Mr Blankenstein said.
Bots can help manage the sheer workload that many workers are facing in the crisis, said Automation Anywhere’s Jones.
“We know the human brain works for 5.5 hours a day, and then we start forgetting things, we start making mistakes,” he said.
“Bots don’t do that.”
“They can work 24 hours a day.”
Unlike Unleash Live’s social distancing bot, Automation Anywhere’s contact tracing bot doesn’t analyse live video feeds to calculate who might have been in contact with the virus.
What it does do is speed up the vast amount of paperwork involved in contact tracing and collates data into a map that authorities can use for decision-making.
Other bots are being used by companies to keep track of their workforce, now that many workers have been sent home.
“This pandemic will create more opportunities for using a digital workforce in many different areas,” said Jones.
“Before it was a cost-saving initiative,” said Mr Blankenstein.
“Now it’s arguably a life-saving initiative.”
* John Davidson writes for the Australian Financial Review and is head technician at Digital Life Labs. He tweets at @DLLabs.
This article first appeared at www.afr.com/technology.
