Heena Sharma Blog

  One of the dilemmas facing the Union Health ministry during the initial days of the pandemic was whether the government’s response to the health crisis should go through the loops of bureaucracy or should it cast aside established procedures and norms in favour of working with select private players and giving them access to data. Documents obtained through the RTI act show that the Health Ministry made the choice to take the latter route. The ministry got 7 private players on board without following the standard procedure of inviting expressions of interest. These companies were picked from among several organisations that contacted the ministry and volunteered to help. A note from an under-secretary reads that the seven companies were required to help with “latest tools and technologies for analytics, visualisation, forecasting methodology and documentation”. A major concern here is that the Covid war room has access to data that would be useful for companies looking to expand...

Continuing its fight against coronavirus , the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said a total of 2,74,599 samples have been tested for Covid-19 detection so far, with 28,941 samples being tested on Wednesday. The samples were taken from 2,58,730 individuals which is lower than the samples tested because many suspected patients were tested more than once, according to the statement released by ICMR. On April 15, till 9 p.m., 28,941 samples have been reported, out of which 953 were found positive for Covid-19. "At least 11,297 individuals have been confirmed positive among suspected cases and contacts of known positive cases in India," it said. Read More

Touted as the world's "most human" Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant that can "read between the lines" and "understand emotional expressions", Amelia has the potential to turn India's healthcare sector into an inclusive one, believes her creator Chetan Dube, CEO of New York-headquartered AI company IPsoft. Amelia got her name from Amelia Earhart, one of the pioneering women in American history who became the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932. The tech Amelia combines automation, cognitive and emotional intelligence with Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to perform as a digital colleague. When Amelia was first created, her conversational abilities sent shockwaves in the AI community, raising fears of job losses, especially in countries like India where a large number of people are employed in the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. But Dube, who left a teaching job at New York Un...