As part of the fight against the Covid-19 global pandemic, Mila, the Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle, announced the creation of a tracking application. Yoshua Bengio, Scientific Director of Mila, presented COVI yesterday and unveiled a White Paper prepared by researchers involved in the project.

The Covid-19 tracking application, similar to other initiatives around the world, was developed in Canada and designed to protect privacy. According to Valérie Pisano, President and CEO of Mila, COVI uses artificial intelligence to empower citizens to protect themselves, limit the spread of the virus and facilitate a safe and informed removal of social distancing measures by public health authorities. Reassuring about privacy protection, she adds that these data are collected from a pool of 400 to 700 people, so the level of accuracy is vague.

To introduce the application, Mila unveiled a white paper entitled COVI White Paper – Version 1.0, signed by the researchers involved in the project : Hannah Alsdurf, Yoshua Bengio, Tristan Deleu, Prateek Gupta, Daphne Ippolito, Richard Janda, Max Jarvie, Tyler Kolody, Sekoul Krastev, Tegan Maharaj, Robert Obryk, Dan Pilat, Valérie Pisano, Benjamin Prud’homme, Meng Qu, Nasim Rahaman, Irina Rish, Jean-Franois Rousseau, Abhinav Sharma, Brooke Struck, Jian Tang, Martin Weiss, Yun William Yu.

In this document, they explain the objectives of the application, return to the issues of privacy and data management, the structure of the epidemiological simulator, the use of the learning machine and the user experience.

Translated from COVID-19 : L’institut d’intelligence artificielle Mila présente son application et un Livre Blanc