An artificial intelligence machine built by an Aberystwyth company could prove to be a vital weapon in the fight against coronavirus.

A revolutionary new machine-learning platform built entirely by the brilliance of AI could prove to be a vital weapon in the fight against Covid-19.

Apollo is a pioneering system to deliver a fully automated, AI-driven machine-learning engine – and is already being hailed as a “game-changer”.

Created by Aberystwyth-based applied AI innovation company Agxio, Apollo operates beyond-human-scale performance, enabling the robotic platform to evaluate critical data to produce predictive models to solve real-world problems. It then optimises these to look for patterns or configurations of parameters that human modellers may not even consider or have the patience to develop. This is all done in a matter of hours.

With the appropriate data, Apollo and the power of machine-learning can be used to analyse and predict the efficacy of potential vaccine combinations, outbreak trends, behavioural nudge factors, early warning indicators, medical images against risk indicators and isolation rate projections, for example. But the range of uses for automated machine learning is endless, they say.

Importantly, the fully automated AI-driven engine doesn’t require the user to be a programming expert or data scientist specialist – enabling an expert in a non-data science or machine learning field to be able to study ideas or data that would otherwise take years of experience to be able to apply.

Agxio, which is already backed by the Welsh Government through the Development Bank of Wales, is now offering free use of the platform, together with its technical support team, to all credible researchers, practitioners and government bodies working to defeat Covid-19 for the duration of the pandemic.

Agxio CEO and co-founder Dr Stephen Christie said: “What’s different about Apollo is that this is AI built by AI – artificially intelligent machine-learning. It’s the machine building the machines, a series of robots building the best brains to answer targeted questions. Apollo is designed to focus on problems that are beyond human scale in dimension or complexity and is, without doubt, the most advanced approach of its kind.

“What would take a human literally weeks and months to do, Apollo can generate in minutes and hours. Machine-learning is one of the most important tools and defining technologies of our generation, and Apollo is a complete game-changer in terms of accelerating the building of machine learning and solutions.”

The Agxio team has created a single Covid-19 data portal for the global community.

Coviddata.io is open to any parties for augmentation as cases, data and innovations evolve.

Agxio is keen to hear from any data scientists and Python machine-learning programmers who would like to volunteer support to researchers’ projects. If you would like to put your Covid-19 initiative forward for access to the Apollo platform, or volunteer your technical expertise to projects, email [email protected]