IBM Blockchain Arm to Power MiPasa COVID-19 Data Project
According to a Forbes report published on March 28, 2020, U.S.-based IT giant IBM is set to help data streaming service MiPasa Project via its Blockchain Platform. The MiPasa Project will utilize emerging technologies – including blockchain – for the public health analysis of COVID-19.
IBM Blockchain to Help Fight COVID-19
In a bid to contain the catastrophic socio-economic impact of COVID-19 virus, IBM announced recently that it will leverage its Blockchain Platform to help develop the MiPasa Project. For the uninitiated, the MiPasa Project is an endeavor by various multi-disciplinary health professionals and tech companies from across the world to battle the COVID-19 pandemic.
The official press release reads in part:
“MiPasa is designed to make it possible to synthesize data sources, address their inconsistencies, help identify errors or misreporting and seamlessly integrate credible new feeds. Our hope is that this tool can help technologists, data scientists and public health officials by giving them the data they need at scale to respond and devise solutions that can help subdue the outbreak or support recovery.”
Notably, members being onboarded to the project are brought in through the Unbounded Network, which is running a production version of The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric on multiple clouds.
The effort is being supported by a wide array of global tech giants and supranational organizations including the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, the World Health Organization (WHO), and John Hopkins University, among others.
The press release further urges other entities to partake in the project to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 virus. It adds:
“We eagerly want more data providers to either contribute their own data, for example governments, hospitals, and anyone who might want to share this information with researchers fighting the outbreak. We are also inviting researchers in statistics and probability, machine learning and A.I. to help us analyze the data. Finally, we’re also looking for other types of resources as well, from developers to help us fix code, to application designers that can harness the powerful data platform that we have built.”
Blockchain to the Rescue
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has managed to bring the world to a virtual standstill, developments in the blockchain sector have only sped up to tackle the novel virus.
BTCManager reported on March 23, 2020, how the U.S. authorities had listed blockchain technology among the critical infrastructure services needed to effectively reduce the spread of the virus.
