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00:00So explain to us exactly what's being done what's IBM's role in this thing. How could we actually maybe get a vaccine a bit sooner. So the largest supercomputer in the world is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory constructed by IBM. And this system has a capability of merging concepts of artificial intelligence with standard mathematical representations of problems. So what we do is when we look at the possibilities of efficacious treatment for something like Corona looking for a virus what you want to do is you want to follow a lot of different paths because you don't know which path will be the one that pays off . So in particular at Oak Ridge they've looked at 8000 different compounds with a supercomputer. They've called that down to 77 compounds in just two days. So those 77 compounds then go into a wet lab where they begin doing the experimentation on to see if they work or not. So give me a sense of normal if I'm going at eight thousand to seventy seven. How long would it take for using a supercomputer or artificial intelligence. Years. Years . Yeah . And it would cost a huge amount of money because you'd have to build up a wet lab to look at every one of those 8000 thousand compounds. Now practically what you would do is you'd make a guess. You'd hope your guess was good and then you would start down that path. But you'd have no real idea of whether you're getting close or not. And Dave Hunt team to you. Do you then wait for the wet lab portion of this to do combinations of those 77. So the seventy seven or each looked at and then you can while the wet labs are being operated you can look at early results from the wet lab experiments and you begin to do mathematical modeling speculatively about how those what lab results might manifest themselves in a real life application. You can also begin to explore combinations of these things as well. As you said. So how do you get from there to a vaccine. Are you basically understanding the mechanism by which the virus works. It's it's a variety of things done in concert. So you look at things sort of in our time you know a second a minute a day. But a lot of modeling goes on in extraordinarily small pieces of time tend to the minus 14 you know at atomic level atomic kind of clock speed . And you begin to build up your understanding of the systems by operating simulating things at every one of those time steps then aggregating them up to clock time where we're generally used to and then looking at that over days weeks et cetera tremendous amount of compute power. That's just a molecule by itself. Then you look at it in concert with the disease then you look at in concert with the human organism and you begin to look at the interplay of all these factors to understand what the probabilities are of having a successful event. Has this ever been done before. So yes in fact IBM worked with some of the previously emergent new strains of flu. The last H1N1 thing I think they came out of Mexico. We used our technology at that time to do some modeling of the evolutionary pathway of that . So if you look at flu viruses and the flu shots that you get every fall it's a matter of looking scientifically at what's going on but also predictably at how that virus will evolve over the course of time. And you take a shot at where the puck is going to be and then you build your virus for that and hope for the best. So it's a complicated mathematical construct that you need to examine. And how does the organization of this take place. Is this an IBM initiative. Is it an IBM in concert with the government. Tell me more about about how that works. The system is deployed at Oakridge National Lab was a partnership between the Department of Energy and IBM to construct the computer to cover the vast array of scientific endeavors they pursue. This particular example is of a scientist working out of the University of Tennessee on the system in concert with the researchers at Oak Ridge National Lab. We provide just standard support for the operation of the computer. At this stage there are many other activities going on inside of IBM of course that will look over the course of time at different factors regarding how you manage pandemics et cetera. But the Oak Ridge problem right now is really being driven out of the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge. So I won't hold you to this because I'm sure there's no knowable answer to it. But in success if it worked perfectly could you take time off that 18 months. And if so how much. I think there I think there are a couple of ways to look at this. One is in the absence of the computer you're basically throwing darts at a dartboard in the dark. And so you don't know if you're even close to the target. So what we've done is we've winter that down quite dramatically. So now the lights are on. You know where the DART dartboard is. You know if the darts are in your hand you can start taking a shot at it . That's a tremendous advantage for the scientists that are working on this. The 18 month is a lot of it is human trials and so on. So it's not going to do so much to compress that time span. But what it has done is it's really accelerated the starting step. So instead of waiting for. A year to come up or two years or three years without sort of 77 we've got a couple of days. That's a big step forward. Who owns this tech. Who owns the IP in this. So so the IP is all being generated by the scientists involved. The Power 9 technology which underscores a computer is all IBM. The ownership of the system is Oakridge National Lab is an agent for the Department of Energy. Have you tried this for other medical applications besides viruses you said you do with the H1N1. Mexico. Have you trained with other medical applications. Yeah we have. We have a group called Watson Health inside of IBM that looks at the amalgamation of artificial intelligence techniques with technologies like Power Nine to bring that to bear on a variety of problems whether it's cancer or other kinds of medical issues. The same technology those been used in industrial sector its use for fintech its use for the design of airplanes cars problems in computational chemistry. And one of the very rich areas is material science. Material science percolates through our economy and the ability to understand how these different materials are working and how to invent new materials is a critical dimension to how you drive the economy forward. Same technology can be used for that .

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Second Opinion: AI & the Cure for Covid-19

Dave Turek, IBM Cognitive Systems Vice President of Technical Computing, discusses IBM's critical role in scientific advances, including a potential treatment for Covid-19. He speaks to Bob Diamond of Atlas Merchant Capital and host David Westin on "Bloomberg Wall Street Week." (Source: Bloomberg)

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