How AI could help to prepare for future pandemics according to Oxford scientists
Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to help society prepare for future pandemics, researchers from the University of Oxford say.
Scientists from across the globe, including Africa, America, Asia, Australia, and Europe, have outlined how AI can change the landscape of infectious disease research and improve preparedness for pandemics.
The study highlights the importance of safety, accountability, and ethics in the use of AI for infectious disease research.
The researchers are calling for a collaborative and transparent approach in terms of datasets and AI models.
Lead author Professor Moritz Kraemer, from the University of Oxford's Pandemic Sciences Institute, said: "In the next five years, AI has the potential to transform pandemic preparedness.
The scientists warned against relying solely on AI to deal with the challenges of a pandemic (Image: PA) "It will help us better anticipate where outbreaks will start and predict their trajectory, using terabytes of routinely collected climatic and socio-economic data.
"It might also help predict the impact of disease outbreaks on individual patients by studying the interactions between the immune system and emerging pathogens.
"Taken together and if integrated into countries' pandemic response systems, these advances will have the potential to save lives and ensure the world is better prepared for future pandemic threats."
The research identifies several opportunities for AI in pandemic preparedness, including improving current models of disease spread, pinpointing areas of high-transmission potential, and enhancing genetic data in disease surveillance.
AI could also help to determine the properties of new pathogens, predict their traits, and identify whether cross-species jumps are likely, as well as predict which new variants of already-circulating pathogens might arise.
However, the scientists caution against relying solely on AI to solve infectious disease challenges.
They suggest integrating human feedback into AI modelling workflows could help to overcome existing limitations.
The authors also express concerns about the quality and representativeness of training data, the limited accessibility of AI models to the wider community, and potential risks associated with the deployment of black-box models for decision making.
Study author Professor Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said: "While AI has remarkable transformative potential for pandemic mitigation, it is dependent upon extensive worldwide collaboration and from comprehensive, continuous surveillance data inputs."
Study lead author Samir Bhatt, from the University of Copenhagen and Imperial College London, added: "Infectious disease outbreaks remain a constant threat, but AI offers policymakers a powerful new set of tools to guide informed decisions on when and how to intervene."
The authors suggest rigorous benchmarks to evaluate AI models, advocating for strong collaborations between government, society, industry, and academia for the sustainable and practical development of models for improving human health.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
17 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Wayve and Uber plan London robotaxi launch after UK speeds up autonomous vehicle rollout
U.K.-based autonomous vehicle technology company Wayve and Uber plan to launch a fully driverless robotaxi service in London in the coming years. The news comes soon after the U.K.'s announcement of an accelerated framework for self-driving commercial pilots. U.K. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander confirmed Tuesday that the U.K. government would fast-track pilots to spring 2026, up from late 2027, to incentivize investment in autonomy in the country. Wayve and Uber did not share many details of their upcoming launch, such as when exactly the companies would begin trials and service, with how many vehicles, or via which vehicle manufacturer partner or partners. Wayve said in April that its tech would be headed to Nissan vehicles. The announcement follows Uber's strategic investment into Wayve in 2024 that promised to see the startup's AI integrated into consumer vehicles that will one day operate on Uber's platform. A Wayve spokesperson told TechCrunch the companies would start in the U.K. capital and scale out to greater London and beyond from there. First, every company involved in launching a robotaxi service would need to prove relevant safety cases to regulators. 'We have a partner ecosystem for bringing a service to market,' Sarah Gates, Wayve's director of public policy, told TechCrunch. 'Wayve provides driving intelligence integrated into a base vehicle provided by a vehicle manufacturer, and then we would have a fleet operator, and Uber would operate the service. So each part of that supply chain would need to prove safety and responsible deployment for what they're responsible for.' In Wayve's case, the company needs to prove the safety of the system and how it drives within its operational design domain. Uber would have separate commitments around operating a passenger service responsibly and having things like customer service in place. 'This is a defining moment for U.K. autonomy,' Alex Kendall, Wayve's CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. 'With Uber and our global OEM partner, we're preparing to put our AI Driver technology into real service on the streets of London, delivering on our AV2.0 vision for scalable autonomy. Our Embodied AI learns to drive anywhere, in any vehicle, and this trial brings us closer to bringing safe and intelligent driving to everyday rides across the UK and beyond.' Wayve recently published a blog detailing the initial findings from its 'AI-500 Roadshow,' a project to visit 500 cities using a single AI model by the end of 2025. So far, the startup has hit 90 cities in 90 days, spanning Asia, Europe, and North America. The demonstration is designed to prove that Wayve's technology can operate anywhere it's placed, rather than relying first on mapping a region. That's relevant data to a company like Uber, which operates globally and has been doing deals with almost every AV company to scale its autonomous capabilities fast. 'Uber has got one of the largest mobility networks globally, so the fact that our AI can serve as their global network is a big reason why this partnership and this [driverless] trialing is so important,' Tilly Pielichaty, a Wayve spokesperson, told TechCrunch. 'We are starting in the U.K., but the ambition is to take it everywhere.' Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
The Verge
21 minutes ago
- The Verge
Meta is reportedly making a $15 billion bet on AGI
Meta is close to finalizing an almost $15 billion investment in Scale AI, the tech giant's largest-ever external investment, which would give Meta a 49% stake in the company, according to The Information. As part of the deal, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally assembling a team of about 50 people to help Meta supercharge its AI goals — specifically, to achieve artificial general intelligence — and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang is set to join that group once the deal is final, according to Bloomberg and The New York Times. AGI is the concept of AI that equals or surpasses human cognitive abilities, and it's something that nearly every AI industry leader is currently racing to achieve before their competitors. Bloomberg was first to report on the planned multibillion-dollar investment. Scale, the AI giant that provides training data to industry leaders like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, in April reportedly expected that its 2025 revenue would more than double year-over-year to about $2 billion. It's also currently planning a tender offer for employees and early investors at a $25 billion valuation. Meta has been concerned about falling behind in the AI race as competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft pull ahead. In May, Meta delayed the launch of its new flagship model, dubbed Behemoth, amid concerns about its capabilities compared to competing models, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company's investment in Scale AI is likely a bid to catch up as competing tech giants each choose one or more AI startups to back for greater chances of AI success, whether internally or externally. Amazon has invested at least $8 billion in Anthropic, the AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, and Anthropic's tech now powers Amazon's Alexa Plus. Google has given at least $3 billion to Anthropic, and the two companies share a significant cloud contract. Microsoft has famously invested at least $13 billion in OpenAI and currently gets a share of the company's revenue. Besides its forthcoming deal with Meta, Scale has spent the last few months leaning hard into deals with governments across the world, like a five-year deal with Qatar to provide automation tools for civil service, healthcare, and more. The company has said its work with countries in Asia and Europe could account for a big piece of sales coming up. And in March, Scale signed a multimillion-dollar deal with the Department of Defense for a flagship AI agent program for the U.S. military.
Forbes
22 minutes ago
- Forbes
AI Is Likely To Increase Revenues—As Long As CFOs Can Access Data
It's indisputable: AI's ability to draw nearly instant results from thousands of data points can improve financial analysis and forecasting. Stanford University's 2025 AI Index Report found that 70% of companies using AI for their financial departments have seen their revenues increase, while 56% report their internal costs had gone down. Despite the positive results, making good use of AI remains a challenge. Coupa's Strategic CFO report found that 44% of CFOs say they can't make informed decisions due to data challenges. Nearly half said gathering spend data is too labor intensive. While 85% said they can access this data instantly, nearly six in 10 said they have to tap into multiple systems. About 14% indicated the data-gathering process can take multiple days. And a quarter said their financial processes are still manual. The best AI system in the world won't be helpful if it can't get the data it needs. And in these times, as trade barriers rise and fall within days and stock markets take off and crash at the speed of social media posts, the ability to quickly perform up-to-the-minute analysis can be vital. CFOs need to reach out to CIOs to ensure that the financial systems and data are all modernized. It's time to get rid of legacy systems and file cabinets full of paper. Nine out of 10 CFOs said having a unified platform is crucial to their success, and the time to make those changes is now. In an uncertain economy, businesses are exploring many options to maintain their revenue and improve their viability. Spinning off business units to allow the business core to be more focused while growing other opportunities is an attractive option for larger companies. David Wyshner is a spinoff expert, having served as CFO for six spun-off companies—including Kyndryl, the managed infrastructure services business spun off from IBM in 2021. I talked to him about the strategy and financial opportunities in a spin. An excerpt from our conversation appears later in this newsletter. A help wanted sign in Selden, New York. For the most part, there were no wild swings in the stock market last week. But that doesn't mean things were uneventful. Employment figures were released, showing weak private sector job growth, according to a report from ADP. The U.S. added just 37,000 private sector jobs—far short of consensus forecasts of 110,000 new positions. Small business employment was down 13,000 and manufacturing jobs were down 3,000. Chris Larkin, head of trading and investing at E-Trade, told Forbes that some tariff-related slowdowns in the market were to be expected. Trump, meanwhile, used the report to demand that the Federal Reserve 'LOWER THE RATE' for baseline interest at its meeting next week. (According to CME FedWatch, 99.9% of analysts think interest rates will not be changed.) The Labor Department's employment report was more optimistic, indicating that the U.S. added 139,000 nonfarm jobs from April to May, and the unemployment rate held steady at 4.2%. Meanwhile, the newly increased 50% tariffs on most imported steel and aluminum went into effect last Wednesday. Trump had said this increase was necessary to counter 'trade practices that undermine national security,' though it was condemned by global players including the EU and Canada. At the 2025 Forbes Iconoclast Summit last week, hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin shared his frustration with Trump's 'anti-growth' tariff agenda, which he said has 'taken their toll already on our economy.' Advocates encourage Tesla to fire Elon Musk by flying a banner over Mar-A-Lago as President Trump and Elon Musk feuded last week. Tesla continues to have a difficult time, though its recent problems have been more directly linked to CEO Elon Musk's relationship with President Donald Trump, two men known for high drama. Soon after Musk's stint as a temporary government employee ended, he took to social media, criticizing Trump's bloated budget bill, which contains several tax cuts and is projected $3.8 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. Tesla's stock plummeted, and Trump threatened to take actions that would harm Musk and his companies, including canceling NASA contracts with SpaceX. As the feud has cooled, Tesla's stock has recovered a bit—but it's still down 11% week over week. Even before Musk's controversial entry into politics as Trump's biggest financial backer and his time heading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, gleefully hacking away at government employees, federal departments and funds for research and foreign aid, investors were becoming increasingly skeptical about Tesla. Aside from reactions to Musk's political turn, markets have not looked kindly at Tesla for about a year, as the company's vehicle deliveries, model development and progress on consumer cars have all been on the downswing. Several pension funds have major investments in the company, writes Forbes' Alan Ohnsman, and they have been pushing Tesla's board to do something about Musk. In April, nine state treasurers and comptrollers sent Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm a letter raising concerns about the risks to their economies if the company falters due to poor board governance. 'No other publicly traded company CEO would've been allowed to neglect his day-to-day duties like Musk has. No exception,' said Illinois Treasurer Michael Frerichs, who signed the letter. 'And if they had undertaken personal activities that hurt the reputation of a company or brand that badly, would they be treated like he has been?' getty AI can be a game changer for businesses, but it can also be an expensive drag on the balance sheet. A new report from billing software provider Chargebee found that companies that grew most in the last year were the ones that changed their pricing strategies to account for AI. The ones that were most successful combined a variety of pricing models: recurring subscriptions, usage-based models, outcome-based models and flat fees. Four in five of the companies surveyed that added AI said they are also changing their pricing. But how to adjust prices, especially in a time of economic uncertainty, is a challenge. Just over half said customer retention is their top concern, but 40% of businesses that adjusted prices last year reported a disconnect between increases and customer value. Nearly a quarter of companies struggled with explaining the benefits of adding AI functions to their services, while technical issues also caused struggles. Most SaaS providers have traditionally charged enterprises based on individual licenses, which is far different from a usage fee. Many companies, the study found, are testing out a variety of pricing structures to see what works best. Forbes senior contributor Alison Coleman talked to several companies about how they're making changes to their price strategies. Kyndryl CFO David Wyshner. If you're looking for a CFO with deep spinoff experience, David Wyshner is a good resource. He's worked on spinoffs as CFO at XPO, Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, and is the first CFO for IBM spinoff Kyndryl. I spoke with him about his work with spinoffs, the strategic opportunities they present, and how he's built a solid growth strategy for Kyndryl. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. A longer version is available here. What are some of the things you have handled that are unique to a company going through a spin? Wyshner: There are so many opportunities to decide who you want to be when you grow up, and to start the process of getting there. In the case of Kyndryl, there were two really important elements. The first was: Culturally, how do we want to operate? How do we want to act and feel? The fact that Kyndryl's color is red, and that Kyndryl is spelled in a way that's a little bit funky and all lowercase. The fact that we're based here in New York City, not up in Westchester [County, New York] are all little signals that Kyndryl is different from IBM, its former parent company, that were all done intentionally. The culture we set up to be flat, fast and focused, which aren't always things that our former parent was known for. It was a really important part of what we've set up and tried to organize leadership behaviors around. The second element was establishing our strategy as an independent organization. Our rationale for becoming an independent company is one of the best I've ever seen. Previously, we were a captive managed services provider, and that strategically was just not a good place to be. As an independent company, we became an end-to-end services provider across a range of interconnected technologies. That independence to operate across a technology estate, rather than being constrained to a single parent company's technology, was a game changer. It increased our addressable market, changed what we could do for our customers. We weren't there just to provide help on IBM-related stuff. We were there to be a provider of services across their infrastructure and their tech estate, and we put in place a series of strategies to take advantage of the opportunity associated with that. Tell me about the three A's strategy. How does this strategy lay the groundwork for your plans? About three years ago, we announced the three A's: alliances, advanced delivery and focus accounts. The three A's were perfect for us. They were the things that strategically were important that would move the needle in terms of our results and competitive position. And the execution on them has been really strong. One was alliances, in building out our positioning across the tech estate. Advanced delivery was about driving automation and efficiency in how we deliver infrastructure services to customers. We've freed up thousands of people and saved over three quarters of a billion dollars a year by automating elements of what we do: Delivering services in a more automated and sophisticated way, and taking our service quality, which was always really strong to begin with, and making it even better than it was. That's been a huge win for us. It's been a driver of both margin expansion and continuing to have very strong customer satisfaction scores. The third element was our accounts initiative. When we became independent, we looked across our customer base and found that about 40% of our revenues were coming from accounts where we weren't making any money on a gross margin basis, which means we were losing money on a fully allocated pre-tax basis. Was it just because we were unlucky on 40%? No, it's because that's the way those deals had been priced and set up initially, often when our services relationship was part of a broader IBM relationship. That insight was some of the best news ever because it made it a fixable problem. We needed to get those accounts back to market pricing and levels of margin, and that's what we've been executing against ever since, adding to date about $900 million of annual profit. Of all the initiatives I've been involved with, it's one of the best in terms of impact that it's had and the execution we've delivered. We still have some runway there because we operate under long-term contracts, so not all of our contracts have come up for renewal yet. The idea that we're at $900 million and still have some opportunity to deliver more is incredibly exciting. Two years ago in calendar 2023, our stock was up 87%. Last year, it was up another 67%. This year, we're up in the mid-teens. The three A's have been the core driver because we told people exactly what we were going to do. We've reported on it each quarter, and people were able to see the progress that we've made in a way that really has been great in terms of our do-to-say ratio: What we've done relative to exactly what we said we were going to do. If you were to give some advice to other financial leaders, what would you say? One of the roles of finance is to drive great, impactful decision making across the organization. Where finance could be helpful is by analyzing, collaborating and prioritizing, and those are the areas I focus on. The quality of analysis that we can provide can support decision making. In fact, a lot of times, a good analysis makes what makes a decision really rather obvious. And so good objective analysis is really helpful. In organizations of almost any size, particularly larger organizations, collaboration is so critical to making progress. The third thing on my list is prioritizing. I think people and organizations can so easily get distracted by shiny objects, or devote more resources to things that are good or beneficial, but aren't as good or as beneficial as other things. And as a result, the idea of ruthless prioritization and making sure we're spending our resources—sometimes it's money, but it's often time, or organizational bandwidth for change—in a way that's really optimal. Analyze ruthlessly, collaborate ruthlessly—that's not an oxymoron—and prioritize ruthlessly. A recent study showed that managers believe just over a third of their employees are delivering great work. But if viewed through a lens of potential—two-thirds of employees have room for improvement—the statistic sounds hopeful. Here's what you can do as a leader to facilitate the conditions to work toward that improvement. TED Talks feature speakers with resonant, enlightening and inspirational messages. Even if you're not getting up on such a prominent stage, you can learn from them to become a better public speaker. Here are some tips to ease jitters and improve your message for the next time you talk to any size group. Which stablecoin issuer went public on the New York Stock Exchange last week? A. Tether B. Ethena Labs C. Circle D. MakerDAO See if you got the right answer here.
