5 Times When AI Was Used For Social Good

While artificial intelligence has found a lot of use cases in many industries, another area that is witnessing a lot of traction is for Social Good. Many companies and organisations are either collaborating with not-for-profit organisations or are developing solutions that may help communities and society in general by integrating AI. 

AI is solving some of the pressing social issues. From detecting Zika virus to the Covid-19 pandemic, the use cases for AI for Social good is on the rise. Many global companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and government bodies are deploying AI for positive social initiatives. 

In this article, we bring five use cases when artificial intelligence was used for social good. 

Cough For Covid-19 By Wadhwani Institute For AI: An independent and nonprofit research institute, Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence is on a mission to develop and apply AI-based innovations to a broad range of societal domains such as healthcare, agriculture, education, and more. While it has been working on many projects, one of the recent by the institute is its campaign called Cough Against Covid-19, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They are creating an open dataset to collect cough samples from Covid-19 positive patients. The aim is to make the dataset available for the researchers globally to use this to develop Covid-19 self-screening tools for the general public.  

Google AI For Social Good: Google’s initiative works on projects that address a wide range of social and environmental challenges using AI. Some of their projects include forecasting floods quickly and accurately to prevent potential damage, predicting the risk of cardiac events, mapping global fishing activity and more. In the case of monitoring flood, for instance, it collects data on various environmental and geographic factors that influence flood activity and uses this information to train AI and improve warning systems. In India, it has been used to predict floods, where it sent out its first alert in September 2018.