Collaborating to find solutions to COVID-19

Over the past twenty years I have dedicated my career to developing technologies that rapidly focus expert knowledge and intuition on an opportunity or problem. While the applications of such technologies are many, it’s clear that empowering experts to collaborate on solutions to global crises is critical to our collective future.

At my current company, CrowdSmart, we use AI and collective intelligence technologies to predict the success of startups at the seed stage going on to a growth round. Over the past four years, conducting a wide range of startup evaluations across a variety of sectors, our predictive accuracy on this “seed to growth” prediction model is > 80%. A major part of achieving this accuracy resulted from leveraging the value of diverse inputs from a collection of experts; collective intelligence. Using AI technologies we were able to build a knowledge model for each opportunity that proved to be valuable in substantially improving the accuracy of investment decisions.

In recent weeks as COVID-19 has brought the global economy to its knees and devastated millions of lives, we’ve realized that AI-driven expert decision-making is uniquely positioned to generate urgently needed solutions, from vaccine discovery and antibody testing to in-home symptom screening. We need to rapidly tap into the diverse collective expertise of those who have potentially impactful knowledge.

How can human-empowered AI help?

Right now, we urgently need to generate new data through human ingenuity and collaboration. Human-empowered AI and collective intelligence engages a wide range of experts and enables them to brainstorm solutions and reach collaborative agreement beyond borders and geographical barriers.

There are many ways expert-driven AI can be used to identify solutions for the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 30 we connected with Adam Sah (an ex-Google engineer) and a project at Mount Sinai Health System that was designing a program to help high-risk symptomatic people stay at home for remote COVID-19 screening, rather than having to go into the hospital. A few days later, a joint webinar featuring Dr. Chris Kellner brought together experts and donors to share their thoughts on the program and how to improve and scale it together (you may view a recording of this here). The Mount Sinai team has now connected with Stanford’s Healthcare Innovation Lab, and global experts are being invited to participate by adding their ideas and connections.

Here’s where you come in.

Whatever your background, your expertise could be especially of value at this moment. In less than an hour of your time you can learn about the work underway and collaborate with others on advancing solutions, at this link.

Once you’re at the CrowdSmart / Mount Sinai Partnership page:

1. Enter your email address
2. Watch the video of the webinar to learn more about the program
3. Provide comments and rank peer feedback.
4. Link our team to other connections that might be helpful in addressing the immediate needs in New York
5. Stay in the loop for further updates on how you can help scale a solution to the global problem of healthcare system overload.

We also welcome your input on other initiatives that could benefit from using our technology to rapidly focus expert knowledge and resources on this critical issue.

It’s clear that direct access to the best ideas and trusted expert opinions are critical to address a global challenge. We’re living in a time when the speed of innovation makes trustworthiness of information of paramount importance. This crisis presents an opportunity to rethink how we work together to make decisions, allocate resources, and make investments.

We look forward to hearing your ideas. You can reach us at info@crowdsmart.io to continue the conversation.

For more on Human-Empowered AI and collective intelligence click here. Some other articles you might find interesting are: Learning what resonates with the market and How Collective Judgments Lead to Better Investment Decisions.