Google Research Lab in India is driving a research project which may help policymakers design lockdown strategies in the future, in a bid to contain situations like the one caused by the Covid-19 virus outbreak currently.
The ongoing research project – in collaboration with the Google Research team in the United States and the University of Virginia — is studying anonymised and aggregated data of mobility patterns and will be deployed later to form various simulations, Manish Gupta, Director of Google Research, India told ET in an interview.
“Some of this is really more of fundamental research. Instead of just speculating whether the lockdown helped, instead of having preconceived notions of what works or doesn’t work, can we in a very systematic manner examine what’s really the impact of mobility on the spread of the infection? So, that’s one piece of research,” Gupta said.
A paper on how mobility factors impact the spread of Covid-19 infections will be published soon, he added.
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The one-year-old Google Research Lab is also sharing those insights with premier research institutes like the Indian Institute of Science to help build a simulation model to evaluate different scenarios.
Several concerns have been raised about the accuracy of some of the simulation models, and that is the reason why Google is relying on fundamental research in understanding how the spread happens, he said. “We are analyzing that data and seeing if we can do some more deep-rooted work and truly build better models that will allow policymakers to be able to make better decisions.”
The system is, however, at a very early stage, he cautioned.
The Lab is relying on sources such as Johns Hopkins University and government published reports for its input data.
While similar research is being done for other countries as well, the focus is greater on India. “India isn’t behaving as a single country. There are parts of India which are affected with varying degrees, so we are doing that analysis at the state level; not just the state level, even at the district level and even deeper,” he said.
Google Research under Gupta is also deploying machine learning and artificial intelligence to study cardiovascular diseases, which account for a large percentage of deaths in the country, in order to come up with data driven solutions that focus on prevention healthcare.
Gupta refrained from giving a timeline for the research insights to be ready, saying it was trying to understand this phenomenon deeply.
“What we are trying to do is to marry the world of simulations with this world of machine learning, where you automatically try to infer the model based on the analysis of the data. So, you let the data tell the machine what should be the parameters of the model, right? And how to predict that data for future dates.”
From a technology point of view, machine learning and epidemiological models are being deployed. The simulations look at situations such as how humans are going to behave in such a situation, who they are going to interact with and what is the risk of them passing on the infection to one of their contacts.
Courtesy: ET tech
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