back to article Thankfully, our AI savior is here to nail the COVID-19 pandemic: A neural network that can detect coughing

The AI community is attempting to tackle the coronavirus pandemic using all sorts of algorithms in its toolbox. As such, it's coming up with ways to predict the virus’ protein structure, crunch through thousands of science papers, and now, er, detecting coughs. Humans are pretty good at hearing coughs, so why do we need …

  1. Mike 137 Silver badge

    Fast turn round research

    From inception to publication this project cannot have taken more than four months. That's remarkably swift - particularly the publication cycle. That alone typically takes six months to a year.

    1. Sam Jelfs

      Re: Fast turn round research

      "We conducted an IRB-approved 7 month-long study from December 10, 2018 to July 12, 2019"

      The data they collected and trained their model on has nothing to do with COVID-19...

      1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
        Coat

        No, but it's a great marketing opportunity.

  2. macjules
    Facepalm

    "The AI community"

    Good one.

  3. Chris G

    It's not the cough that carries you off

    It'll be the AI linked health police.

    If the system could, as mentioned in the article, be much more discerning as to the type of cough it might be useful, as it is I don't see a genuine practical use for it without more development.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It's not the cough that carries you off

      The model was trained on audio snippets of people coughing, sneezing, and clearing their throat from four different datasets.

      Does it allow for the hayfever that this nice early spring has brou...brou... ACHOO!, sorry, brought?

  4. SVV

    We have the initial validation that the coughing indeed has a correlation with influenza

    I'm sure that your new discovery will prove very helpful to the doctors who never knew that before. Especially, since without thermal cameras, microphones and AI convolutional neural networks they may never have been able to determine whether a patient has a temperature and a cough. Luckily for the inventors, this useless tech has arrived at the precise time when people might be stupid enough to buy it. Especially politicians who are just itching to proclaim that they have thrown millions at AI to fight the problem in order to appear "with it". Now is the time when IT pros could be especially helpful in pointing out the true pointlessness of the many many opportunistic attempts to cash in from "medical AI" that are guaranteed to arrive very shortly. And point out any actually useful ones.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Devil

    Just what we need

    Now Alexa can report you to the government which will send you a Facebook message to self isolate while informing your friends and the government will then use Google and Apple to track you to make sure you do.

  6. TodaysSimpleAI

    Lets hope AI helps us defeat this terrible virus so we can look back proudly as out efforts as a global community :)

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