ARMONK, N.Y., July
27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that
it is committing powerful resources, technology and pro bono
expertise to help scientists, the public health community, and
humanitarian agencies in the fight against the Zika virus. As
part of its IBM Impact Grant programs, IBM is providing technology
and talent to Brazil's Oswaldo
Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), a research institution affiliated with
the Brazilian Ministry of Health and one the most prominent science
and technology health institution in Latin America. Fiocruz plans to help track the
spread of Zika by using technology developed by IBM to analyze
clues ranging from anecdotal observations recorded by the general
public on social media, to official data about human travel
patterns.
Insights From Travel Patterns and More
To that end, researchers from IBM's Research Laboratories in
San Jose, California and
Brazil will train Fiocruz
scientists to use STEM (Spatiotemporal Epidemiological
Modeler), software that models and visualizes the spread of
infectious diseases. STEM can help public health officials and
epidemiologists analyze the effects of responses that take into
account factors like geography, weather, the passage of time, human
travel patterns, roadways, and airports. The STEM modeling
platform, developed by IBM and donated to the Eclipse Foundation, a
steward of open source technology, has been used to study and help
predict the spread of infectious diseases like influenza and Ebola,
and mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue
fever.
Online Chatter
Also as part of the IBM Impact Grant, IBM will work with Fiocruz
to identify and understand citizen concerns by analyzing public,
Portuguese-language Twitter postings that discuss the incidence of
Zika, dengue, and Chikungunya, as well as the appearance of the
Aedes aegypti mosquito, the species mainly responsible for these
illnesses. After Fiocruz defines search parameters, IBM's Research
Lab in Brazil will then put IBM's
cloud-based sentiment analytics technology to work to harvest and
interpret anonymized data. The report IBM produces for Fiocruz will
enable it to make actionable recommendations directly to public
health officials. IBM researchers applied similar technology at the
2014 World Cup in Brazil,
analyzing nearly 60 million social media posts. The researchers
developed sophisticated algorithms to analyze large volumes of
posts on social networks in near real-time.
Weather Data Offers Clues
In addition, IBM plans to donate a one-year subscription feed of
highly local, daily rainfall, average temperature and relative
humidity data from The Weather Company to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF,
which supports UNICEF's work, and other efforts in support of
the world's children, through fundraising, advocacy and education
in the United States. IBM intends
for UNICEF to use the information from The Weather Company, an
IBM business, to better understand patterns of the spread of Zika,
with a special focus on Brazil.
Outputs from the platform will allow UNICEF and other agencies to
more rapidly understand our increasingly complex world. Rainfall,
temperature and humidity play key roles in the development of Aedes
aegypti larvae, the primary mosquito that carries Zika. Over 20,000
of these weather-related data points spread across Brazil can provide daily information used to
help estimate the larvae's proliferation.
Help from Programmers
Marshaling assistance from the programmer community, IBM will
support a hackathon at Fiocruz this fall in Brazil, at which 70 approximately software
developers will be challenged to develop health apps. These might
include apps that enable people to more easily identify or report
mosquito larvae or update public health officials on a local virus
outbreak, and other issues related to health. IBM will help to
identify appropriate software programmers and will provide its
Bluemix cloud technology used for developing the
applications.
Data for Social Good
IBM Research is collaborating with the Cary Institute of
Ecosystem Studies to collect and mine biological and ecological
data from mosquitoes and primates. The team will build cognitive
algorithms that can determine which primates are carriers for the
Zika virus. This information will allow government and ecological
organizations to better identify and target which primates are
candidates for viral surveillance and management. This project is
part of IBM's "Data for Social Good" initiative, which uses
science and technology to help address the world's most challenging
problems.
Virtual Supercomputer Seeks Cure
Other Zika-related efforts supported by IBM include the
OpenZika project running on IBM's World Community Grid, a
virtual, crowdsourced supercomputer that IBM created. A free app is
available for download that automatically provides to researchers
the unused computing power on volunteers' computers or Android
devices. Through this philanthropic initiative, scientists in
Brazil and the U.S. now have the
ability to screen millions of chemical compounds to identify
candidates for treatments to combat the Zika virus. In the first
two months of the study, more than 50,000 volunteers from all over
the world have enrolled and donated the equivalent of over 4,000
years of computing time and performed more than 20,000 virtual
experiments, saving researchers $1.5
million in equivalent computing
resources. To enroll your device, and assist in the study,
please click here. To view one researcher's account of the project
with English dialogue, please visit here. For a Portuguese-language
version of the video, please go here.
Virus-Preventing Macromolecule
Finally, IBM is already collaborating with organizations to
develop resources that might prevent infections in the first place.
For example, IBM Research and Singapore's Institute of Bioengineering and
Nanotechnology recently announced that they have identified a
macromolecule that could help prevent deadly viral infections such
as Zika.
Contact(s) information
Angie Hu
IBM Media Relations
914-499-6532
ahu@us.ibm.com
Ari Fishkind
IBM Media Relations
1 (914) 499-6420
fishkind@us.ibm.com
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SOURCE IBM