Open-source AI tool provided to aid virus fight

Writer: Wang Jingli  |  Editor: Stephanie Yang  |  From: Shenzhen Daily 

The Shenzhen-based tech company Tencent donated 10 million yuan (US$1.41 million) to the World Health Organization and provided an open source AI-powered tool to assist the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, the Shenzhen Economic Daily reported Friday.

This is the second time that Tencent has provided open-source technological tools amid the outbreak.

On March 27, Tencent provided an open-source COVID-19 live update module which has reportedly answered 6 billion queries related to the epidemic in China over the past two months.

The AI tool, which is called the COVID-19 self-triage assistant, is now available on Github for developers around the world, enabling preliminary self-evaluation regarding infection of the disease and providing tips on its prevention, according to Tencent.

As a supplementary tool to Tencent Health’s COVID-19 international live update module, the open-source COVID-19 self-triage assistant follows the Diagnosis and Treatment Protocol for Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia (Provisional 7th Edition) published by the National Health Commission on March 4.

It has been reviewed and approved by the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association and has incorporated China’s experience in containing the outbreak to help global societies.

The tool helps users showing symptoms, such as fever and cough, to conduct a quick preliminary self-evaluation of their illness and to seek appropriate medical care.

For global developers, open-source code has made it much easier to adapt medical guidelines based on the versions released by local authorities, providing more valuable guidance for local people, said the Tencent.

As of this March, Tencent has provided 98 open-source projects covering various subjects, including cloud computing, big data, AI healthcare, and network security.