Dr. Kira Radinsky can actually fix the world. At the 2019 OurCrowd Global Investor Summit, eBay’s Chief Scientist and Director of Data Science disclosed how her desire to understand causality between world events led her to develop the ultimate AI data system. Dr. Kira Radinsky’s AI system seems straight out of the future: her algorithm-based technique can not only reposition drugs, it can also predict global calamities in an effort to prevent them.

Data as a means to predict disease outbreaks and riots

Try to picture sorting through every tweet, web search, and article.

Ever.

Kira Radinsky built a system that can process all of that information. But she then wanted to go further. She recognised the power that may lie within data and asked herself, can the data processing system calculate the common denominator between dozens of ebola outbreaks? The system revealed that when people were looking for diamonds and gold, the carriers of Ebola – bats – would migrate. In fact, the latest Ebola outbreak first presented itself in a three year old child who ate uncooked bat bushmeat.

Kira took the data system to the next level and identified both correlations and causations to predict many types of other disease outbreaks like cholera or waterborne diseases. In 2011 the system read a news article about a drought in Cuba and was able to predict (and prevent) a possible cholera outbreak. After tropical storms heated Cuba, the system warned of a much higher probability of an outbreak. Indeed Cuba’s first cholera outbreak in 130 years occurred less than a year later, but the system had plenty of time to issue a solution that could be implemented. The data system was also able to predict riots, such as the 2013 Sudan riots which followed a rise in gas prices.

The AI system to cure us all

After a discussion with a Nobel laureate, Radinsky was inspired to build a healthcare data system that runs through thousands of hypotheses a second and decides on the correct one for medication. Kira input drugs in the system and asked the system for alternative diseases any of the drugs could treat. The system succeeded in identifying a number of alternative uses for drugs, among them a drug for hypertension that can be used for diabetes.

Radinsky realized that if the system can identify alternative uses for certain drugs, maybe it can also change drug structures and create new ones. After running the AI algorithm, the system created 35 drugs that are identified by the FDA. Then, it made sixty percent changes to the molecular structure of Pyrazinamide, a toxic drug, and created, the number one drug for tuberculosis. The system can apparently speed up medical breakthroughs by 20 years.

But Kira Radinsky isn’t done saving lives. Radinsky finally looked to leverage this AI system in emergency rooms to help make up for the shortage of doctors. The AI system resulting from Kira Radinsky’s research is running today in 4 hospitals in Israel and is in trials in New York, saving approximately 12 minutes per patient, per doctor. The system cuts down time by identifying medical records of a patient and asks him or her preliminary questions in order to determine what issue these symptoms signalled in the past and to predict their current state and potentially save their lives.

Watch Kira Radinsky’s full keynote from the 2019 OurCrowd Global Investor Summit:

Inspiring data-driven impact solutions

The phenomenon of utilizing AI data systems for rapid innovation is hot in the tech world right now. On top of Kira Radinsky’s breakthrough work, data.world, a platform for modern data teamwork, is looking to spread the power of data and create data-driven cultures by making it more accessible to the public. The company serves enterprises by speeding up data work and creating shared context to preserve and perpetuate essential project knowledge.

Another startup by the name of Cognigo, which was recently acquired by Nasdaq-listed NetApp, also uses AI to manage and ensure the safety of data so that it can be utilized properly. Through advanced machine learning technologies, Cognigo automatically classifies sensitive data, establishes access rights to documents, and indicates possible data breaches.

Check out more companies utilizing the power of data to change the future on OurCrowd.com.