Eureka was established in 1985 as an agreement between 18 countries and the European Commission to foster competitiveness and market integration, and encourage R&D cooperation. Today, the organization is present in over 48 countries in Europe and beyond, making them one of the world’s most extensive public networks for supporting and strengthening international cooperation in R&D and innovation. Eureka countries share a common goal to increase the productivity and excellence of industries. They support lasting employment and national economic growth by encouraging international collaboration between companies, research organizations, and universities.
A recent Eureka project was LIF2.0, which aimed to develop a rapid response to COVID-19 needs in industry and public organizations by offering a real-time data-driven platform covering Danish and Dutch aggregated COVID-19 content from trustworthy data sources. The project was a partnership between Dutch AI software company SemLab, Radboud University Medical Centre, and 2021.AI.
The challenge
Currently, many European organizations, in industry and the public sector alike, keep information in spreadsheets, making the data more susceptible to errors and more difficult to share both between departments and organizations. In rapidly developing situations, such as the pandemic, even more problems can arise. The information rapidly becomes outdated, leading to an inaccurate or incomplete understanding of the current situation and the relevant actions to be taken.
Added considerations, such as GDPR and the origins of the data, also needed to be taken into account. Maintaining privacy and data protection is crucial in data models for use in government, hospitals, academia, and vaccine manufacturers. To provide valuable insights that can be used in decision-making, the data going into the models must come from trustworthy sources.
The amount of information about COVID-19 is exploding. This information is diverse, ranging from virus detection in Barcelona wastewater to new positive human trials results from the Oxford vaccine or growing commuter numbers in the London Tube. Artificial Intelligence can help to process this growing amount of information into proportional insights. These insights enable people to react to changing COVID-19 situations, affecting business operations and everyday human life. Bram Stalknecht, CEO, SemLab
The project, LIF2.0, aimed to consolidate and curate from a multitude of data sources and make it real-time available for healthcare and industrial partners via a single, secure platform. 2021.AI’s enterprise AI platform Grace enables the project to be delivered in compliance with the existing and future legal frameworks surrounding data, allowing for the platform’s use in highly regulated industries.
The solution
2021.AI and its two partners developed a platform that enables the integration and implementation of disparate data to create better insight and support decision-making in the fight against COVID-19.
The platform delivered insights and impact estimates using aggregated and reliable data on a large scale while maintaining privacy and data protection.
Identifying reliable sources was the first step in the project. Many data sources were taken into consideration, but they had to be proven trustworthy channels to be incorporated into the platform. They include national news, available corona triage reports, quantitative data, vaccine rollout statistics, data from nation wastewater surveillance systems, amongst others. Once the data was collected, sentiment analysis and statistical analytics was carried out to extract valuable information from the data sets.
The results
2021.AI delivered a single visualization dashboard application that consolidates data and offers quick insights into the current state of COVID-19. Run through Grace, the dashboard provides an easy overview of the current data, informing and enabling quick responses to new events and challenges created by the pandemic.
Project highlights
- A single visualization dashboard application that consolidates data and offers quick insights into the current state of COVID-19 in the EU
- Collects government-approved data sources from the Netherlands and Denmark
- Significantly helped lower the risk of accepting new loans
- Leveraging trusted annotated data from disparate data sources to create better insight and support decision-making in the fight against COVID-19.
About the project
In a partnership with Dutch AI software company SemLab and health experts and doctors at Radboud University Medical Centre, 2021.AI will provide up-to-date actionable insights into the spread of COVID-19. It is intended to be used across the EU and is delivered through our Grace Enterprise AI platform, leveraging sentiment and data modeling from SemLab, and validation by Radboud University.
About SemLab
SemLab are an Artificial Intelligence Software company. They make decisions to support applications with software based on language technology, especially Fintech, Legaltech, and Healthcare. Founded in Sept. 2000 in Amsterdam, SemLab employs a large group of experts in Natural Language Processing-, Computational Linguistics- and Artificial Intelligence technology. They invest heavily in creating leading-edge technology by joining forces with leading research organizations and institutes and most importantly: innovative people.
About RadboudUMC
At RadboudUMC, everything centers around people and their quality of life. The medical center’s mission is to have a significant impact on healthcare. With nearly 10,000 employees and 3,500 students, RadboudUMC combine patient care, research, and scientific training.
