Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times
The Chicago Department of Public Health got the go-ahead on Wednesday to forge a ground-breaking partnership with Rush University Medical Center to undertake “genomic sequencing” to track the spread of coronavirus variants in Chicago.
The City Council’s Committee on Budget and Government Operations signed off on the $3.5 million partnership that will cover sequencing of up to 6,000 sample specimens from Chicagoans who test positive for COVID-19.
It will be bankrolled by a $3 million “epidemiology and capacity grant” received during the first few months of the pandemic from the Centers for Disease Control and a $500,000 grant for the same purpose awarded to the city in December.
AI canât replace humans, but the technology is making inroads in more and more business sectors.
In an oft-quoted interview with Life magazine in 1970, Marvin Minsky, an MIT researcher and pioneer in artificial intelligence, predicted that scientists were about three to eight years away from creating a machine as intelligent as the average human. Such a machine would âbe able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight,â Minksy said, and it would learn at such a âfantastic speedâ that it would reach genius level within just a few months.
Fifty years later, Minksyâs vision of a machine on par with the human brain still hasnât been realized â but popular AI tools, such as Googleâs search engine and Appleâs Siri, have become part of everyday life, and machines are learning how to master an array of complex tasks, from operating self-driving cars to spotting tumors to monitoring crops.
The Chicago Department of Public Health awarded Rush a $3.5 million contract to create the lab, which is expected to be fully operational next month, university officials said.
When the Rev. Robert Biekman was diagnosed with COVID-19 last month, he couldn’t help but think what would have happened if he had still weighed more than 360 pounds realizing how his condition four years ago would have hurt his ability to fight the virus and potentially cost him his life.
“If I was as big as I was, this thing would’ve probably taken me out,” said Biekman, 61, who after a 2017 surgery, change in diet and a commitment to run 5 miles every other day, now keeps his weight around 190 pounds or less. He recovered from the virus and now tests negative.