Our top stories President Donald Trump has announced the us will ban flights from mainland europe for 30 days from friday to contain the spread of coronavirus, now officially a pandemic. From the oval office, mr trump said the flight ban would apply to the uk. He announced plans to apply billions of dollars in loa ns to to apply billions of dollars in loans to Small Businesses and encourage Health Insurers to help those affected. In italy, new restrictions will close all shops for two weeks except food stores and pharmacies. Its estimated 12,500 are infected. The death toll has jumped by nearly 200 in the past day alone to 837. Disgraced Film ProducerHarvey Weinstein has been sentenced to 23 yea rs weinstein has been sentenced to 23 years for rape and sexual assault. He was found guilty in new york last month. He still faces further charges in los angeles. Youre up to date on the headlines in stoppage time now for click. Youre up to date on the headlines. Time now for click. This week, the truth about the truth about coronavirus. Can ai help to treat it . Can it predict its spread . Could Quantum Computers find a cure . Also, self driving wheelchair departing now from terminal seven. Ifeel like the queen. Hello. This week marks three months since the world first heard about a newly identified disease. I am of of course talking about covid 19, which is caused by a new type of coronavirus. To date, there have been over 3000 deaths from nearly 100,000 confirmed cases in 81 countries. And this is how i know that. This is thejohn Hopkins University covid 19 dashboard. Since it went live injanuary, it has gone viral and in a good way by demystifying the stats and the numbers behind the spread of this disease. Its amalgamating data from many of the Worlds Health agencies and so for example right now i can see the total number of confirmed cases is just over 93,000, these are the countries where they have confirmed cases and, just as importantly i think, this is the total number of people who have already recovered completely from the disease. And this is just one of the pop up projects that have appeared online,
aiming to demystify the glut of covid 19 data. Community powered site next strain drops the genome data shared by scientists around the world. As covid 19 is transmitted from person to person, it can change its genetic make up in subtle ways, allowing researchers to build a family tree. To see how the disease has spread and its genuinely fascinating stuff. A health crisis, particularly one that is growing rapidly like the coronavirus outbreak, we really need to communicate with people about what they can do individually and collectively to try and help get this under control. But also its important that individuals understand that if they make minor relatively mundane changes to their behaviour, they can help us to slow the spread of this down. In 2018, the bbc ran its own experiments to simulate the spread of a flu like disease using a network of virtually
infected smartphones. For me, the show did a brilliantjob of revealing how simple things like washing our hands can make a massive difference to how quickly and how far a disease spreads. 0n the right is what happens if we all wash our hands really well. 0n the left is what happens if we do not. Just look at how the spread is slowed if we follow the advice of washing our hands well and often. Posts like this are everywhere on social media, recommending good handwashing techniques and other scientifically grounded tips to try and limit the spread of germs. But they are not the only things you might find if you look online for coronavirus information. Over the past few months, social Media Companies have been waging their own war against a different kind of pathogen. Dubbed an infodemic by the world health organisation, social networks have been deluged with information about the coronavirus. Some of this is correct, and helpful, but a lot of it is misleading, half true or completely fake. And that is making the real information and advice much harder to find. Looking through tiktok now, and it looks like any search for coronavirus or similar term now brings up this banner at the top and these videos from well known organisations at the top spots. Similarly, dubious recommendations seem to have gone, coronavirus conspiracies used be one of the suggestions search tags. Not any more. On facebook, it is a similar story with posts from well known and trusted organisations taking up the top spots. So some of the kinds of misinformation that does travel around would be first of all not believing
that there is a problem at all. And that this is a creation in order to try and control people. That has been seen before. And is being seen now. Also, people come up with ideas of cures, whether it is drinking garlic water or whatever that suggest something will happen or that there is a cure out there that it is being withheld. That is the circulating rumour at the moment. And you have to counter that because if you do not, people will not take action in the way that you want them to. So it is really important that we get the true messaging out there and the science underpinning it and that is what we are trying to do. And if youre really interested in educating yourself on the Science Behind covid 19, professor ward has a free online course that should really protect you from the fake facts. So, that is where we are now. But, in this emerging age of Artificial Intelligence, we are starting to get glimpses of how that Technology May help us in fighting outbreaks like this. And lara has been investigating. This coronavirus seems to have shaken up life as we know it. Inevitably, it is going to continue to spread. But how far and fast that is going to happen and what we are going to do about it are still in question. So could Artificial Intelligence play a vital part in providing some answers and maybe even improving the outcome . Ai had an Important Role in the initial understanding of this outbreak. Canadian specialists blue dot deals with global epidemic intelligence and identified very early on that something was amiss through a combination of medical and airline data. We were one of the first groups in the world that identified this outbreak. This was back actually on new years eve day, the morning of december 31, the Machine Learning algorithms that we developed had picked up information in chinese of a pneumonia, it wasnt known to be a coronavirus, of unknown cause, centred around this market in wuhan. When it was presented to our team, we recognised there were parallels to the sars outbreak 17 years earlier so we knew immediately that there were some historic parallels here and that this outbreak really warranted our attention. And this is where the human scientists were needed. Ai can alert but cannot yet do the investigations to say what is really occurring. Detecting an outbreak is really just the first step. There are multiple other things that need to happen. Ultimately, we need to determine what kinds of risk does this pose, is it likely to spread . If it is going to spread, where might it go . What kind of consequences might occur from that spread . And ultimately, we have to get that information into the hands of people
who can then be empowered with the information to take the appropriate actions. It is notjust about tracking, though. The dream is that one day, ai might be able to conjure up necessary vaccines on the spot. 0r repurpose drugs to deal with new challenges. The latter being something benevolent ai in london is already leading the way on. This company uses al to better understand the mechanism of disease. Correlating data on illnesses, drugs and outcomes and providing more information than any human being could ever come up with. And in this case, a potential lead. What are we looking at here . This is a demonstration of our algorithm processing documents in real time, reading the abstracts of scientific publications related to coronavirus and extracting relationships between key biological concepts
that we really care about to carry out drug discovery. And at this point, were just a few months into an outbreak that could really, really grow. How meaningful do you think this data is so far . Theres a huge amount of information being published. We are notjust pulling out the coronavirus information. But we are merging it with a lot of existing publications on underlying biology. 0ur algorithms reads over biology at multiple layers from the nano world of proteins interacting on ourselves, through this maze of biological processes, up to a human defined definitions of diseases. It is very early days for the process but it is suggesting what might be worth further investigation. Now, a lot of people are looking at virals, antivirals and how they might potentially treat the disease. We looked at it from a completely different way. We said, what are the other types of approved drugs that might inhibit the progression of that disease in the body . So, we surfaced a number of drugs and then we did some experimentation based on that, and further research. And we came up with this one drug that we think is best suited. It has both Anti Inflammatory Properties as well as the ability to stop what is called endocytosis, which is what enables the virus to enter the lungs, which is the most potentially dangerous outcome of the coronavirus. The company stresses that this is only conjecture. And although the drug in question is approved for use in rheumatoid arthritis, Clinical Trials and full Scientific Evidence would be needed before it could even come close to being used for this purpose. What we are trying to do is use this technology in the service of science to further the development of novel treatments for diseases that currently have no treatment. Like, right now in the world there is over 9000 diseases that
have no treatment. Ai will play a greater role than it has already because what is being done is genetic sequences are being taken and that is the understanding of the organism itself and this is putting in a database that can then determine where a virus came from and what it might be going in the future. Of course ai has not solved the covid 19 crisis. But it has hopefully help to some extent and should be learning from it to be even more helpful in any future disease outbreaks. Hello and welcome to the week in tech. It was the week Hong Kong AirlineCathay Pacific was fined £500,000 by the uks Information Commissioners Office for failing to protect customers personal data. The bafta games award nominations were announced, with Death Stranding and control leading the pack with 11 nominations each. Winners will be revealed on the 2nd of april. And tesla admitted that it has put older, slower processors in some of its new cars because of supply issues related to the coronavirus. The company said it would upgrade the hardware when supplies improve. If the thought of the smart robots fills you with worry, or even fear, you might want to look away now. These bots have learned to walk in, scarily, just a matter of hours. Google robotics used al to help mechanical monstrosities master the art of walking forwards, backwards and even turning. If that doesnt concerns you, boston dynamics, the company that brought us cyborg canines, have unveiled what happens when robots work together. This strange looking pair have partnered up for a shift
to demonstrate the future of warehouse automation, showing off absolute, unbridled and organised efficiency. But maybe for now, lets just keep them stacking boxes. This extending phone concept can transform from a smartphone into a 7. 8 inch tablet. It is one of several prototypes revealed by chinese phone maker tcl. Instead of a folding display, this concept has a screen that rolls up inside the phone that way, there supposedly will not be a crease on the screen. The one i saw was just a dummy model with no electronics inside, but the company says it is working on the real thing. There will be huge challenges to making this practical. For starters, theyll will have to work out how to stop dirt getting into the mechanism and scratching the screen, although the design is eye catching. Heres another concept a tablet that can be folded in half. When it is closed, it looks a bit like a tiny laptop, which i thought was very cute. And out of all the concepts tcl showed me, i thought this was the most robust and practical. And finally, a trifold tablet essentially a ten inch tablet that folds down into a very chunky phone. It has two hinges one folds forwards, one folds backwards and you can bend it into a lot of unusual shapes, although im not entirely sure why you would want to. Now, none of these are ready to go on sale and the company doesnt even know how much they would cost, but it does give us an idea of what some phones might look like in the future. If computers are, in the future, going to help us design vaccines to take on threats like covid 19, well, those computers are probably going to need to be very different. And theyre also going
to look very different. This is a quantum computer. In this case, one of googles. And while its still early days, one of the things people expect quantum processors will eventually be very good at is solving hugely complex medical problems. A lot of calculations we run today with chemistry, you have to make approximations very early on in the calculation, which means that you decrease the accuracy of the results. With quantum computing, we are hoping that someday, were gonna be able to get High Accuracy in a low amount of time. Quantum computers have some peculiar properties. They can consider Many Solutions to a problem at the same time. Once we truly understand how to build them at scale and operate them, these machines should massively outperform traditional computers at certain tasks. And there is a feeling that we are starting to get close to this quantum dream. At ces earlier this year, ibm, one of googles main quantum competitors, was showing off its 0 system 0ne. It is one of the most beautiful things ive ever seen maybe that is because i am a massive geek, but can you give me a tour of the bits . Yeah, sure. What you see on the outside is a refrigerator, so it is put there to keep everything nice and cold. The quantum chip sits at the very, very bottom of the quantum computer you can see where all of those yeah, that exposure in the centre . The little square . Yes. On that square, we have about 20 qubits on this particular device. 0k. Those are all interconnected. And when this is in operation, it is the coldest thing in the universe. It is 100 times colder than outer space at the very bottom of the quantum computer. Wow. How do you interact with this . Yeah. How do the instructions come in and how do those
the results come out . Yeah, so microwave pulses is what you send in, and it changes the cubits phase and that is how we essentially programme a quantum computer. We can run them from your laptop. Is there a usb port somewhere . Laughter. You just plug it in. Yeah no, we access these over the cloud. The kind of Computer Programme you might write for a quantum computer is nothing like the kind of code you would write for a normal computer, is it . No, it looks totally different. Some of the concepts are kinda of similar, like how you have different gates and things like that. But youre not programming in ones and zeros any more. In fact, when you actually lay it out, it looks much more like a musical composition. So you have lines of qubits and these different gates that interact and it looks like a piece of music. Wow yeah. The more qubits, the more complex a calculation the computer can theoretically make. And at the end of last year, google said that, for the first time, there was one calculation that its quantum computer could do way quicker then a non quantum machine. Which meant that it had reached something called quantum supremacy. But it is something that ibm says is a red herring. They showed something very specific. It was a nice experiment. I think that there is much more work to be done. It was a very specific example. I think that there is a lot of work to be done to be able to broaden that out and show a little bit more applicability. So, i mean, actually like to think of it as quantum advantage, right . Quantum advantage is kind of that point in time where you are doing a calculation on a quantum computer that you couldnt be able to do on a classical computer. So, we were discussing chemistry, for example. It would be when we are able to achieve a higher level of accuracy for a molecule that we cannot do today using a classical computer, or thats, like, too time intensive
or labour intensive to be able to achieve that. Both ibm and google believe that we are on the cusp of Something Big with quantum computing. Ibm talks about the 2020s being the quantum decade. So maybe for the next pandemic, well have bigger weapons in our arsenal. The mind bending world of the quantum computer now, we often talk about Autonomous Cars on this programme but have you ever heard of an autonomous wheelchair . The concept has actually been around for a few years now but issues around reliability have meant the idea has never really made any progress. But one Japanese Company says it has a solution, and paul carter has been to new yorksjfk airport to sit in on a very special live trial. Its safe to say that airports and disabled people havent always been the best of friends. If you have mobility needs, most airports and airlines require you to book assistance in advance, which usually means being manually pushed by staff to a predetermined point within the terminal, resulting in a loss of autonomy and independence. But this might just have the potential to change all of that. This is the whill autonomous wheelchair. At first glance, it looks pretty much like a normal power chair but thanks to some very Clever Technology built into the front here, this has the potential, at least, to transport passengers from security all the way over there, perhaps via duty free, all the way to one of the gates, like