Big Data Tech – Major Player During Crisis

Big Data Tech – Major Player During Crisis

big data

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Big data technologies have been playing a major role in coping with the global COVID-19 pandemic, helping to arrange the huge amounts of data and analyze it in order to achieve meaningful insights about the virus and disease trends. 

Extensive big data tools will be provided to a leading US health agency in order to help cope with the COVID-19 crisis. A Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) subsidiary agency, the Program Support Center (PSC) has signed a $17.3 million contract with the data analytics company Palantir. 

The Palantir Gotham licenses technology is designed to draw in data from myriad sources and, regardless of what form or size, turn the information into a coherent whole. Neither HHS nor Palantir had commented on the specifics of the latest contract at the time of publication, but a forbes.com review of contract records showed it was ordered for the COVID-19 emergency response.

Palantir Gotham is slightly different to the company’s Foundry, a newer product that’s aimed more at general users rather than data science professionals, with more automation than Gotham.

Foundry is being used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to ingest information from all manner of hospitals across America to see where best to provide more or less resources. That includes supplies of COVID-19 personal protection equipment like masks and respirators.

The company is now working with at least 12 governments on their responses to coronavirus, including the U.K.’s National Health Service, which is using Foundry for similar purposes as the CDC.

The U.S. Coast Guard, a department within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), had contracted Palantir for its own COVID-19 response efforts, also according to forbes.com.

Other technology giants like Apple, Google and Oracle have been offering solutions to help ease the crisis. Oracle is working on a giant database to track the impact of COVID-19 treatments on patients. Apple and Google are collaborating on a project for a pro-privacy contact tracing app to help people know if they’ve been in the same area as someone who’d contracted the virus.