Tencent teams up with ‘Sars hero’ Zhong Nanshan on AI, big data lab to combat coronavirus and predict outbreaks
- The joint lab aims to combat the novel coronavirus and help prevent future epidemics
- Tencent is the latest company to team up with top expert Zhong, who is also collaborating with Alibaba Cloud and Foxconn
Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings and a team led by top respiratory disease expert Zhong Nanshan have jointly set up a big data and artificial intelligence lab to combat the novel coronavirus and help prevent future epidemics.
“The priority of the joint lab is to combat the coronavirus,” Tencent said on its official WeChat account on Thursday. “The longer-term goal is to tackle screening and provide early warning of epidemics, respiratory diseases and chest diseases through the use of big data and artificial intelligence.”
The joint lab, which will be headed by Zhong, will establish a screening mechanism connecting online and offline services to provide guidance to at-risk populations for disease outbreaks such as Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, as well as influenza and hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD), which typically occurs in children under five years of age.
At the same time, researchers at the lab will study how artificial intelligence can help improve the diagnosis of respiratory and lung diseases through medical images and forecast future outbreaks, according to Tencent’s post.
Aside from Tencent, competitor Alibaba Cloud has also engaged Zhong to lead a team accelerating viral gene-sequencing, protein-screening and to conduct other research in treating or preventing the virus, in collaboration with its AI-powered computing platform.