Facebook’s Covid-19 survey to be available globally

Team Udayavani, Apr 21, 2020, 11:28 AM IST

Facebook’s Covid-19 survey will be available to users worldwide to help researchers predict the spread of the disease. The social networking company had tied up with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Delphi Research Centre to conduct the initial phase of survey which has been running for almost two weeks.

Facebook will build a tool that lets researchers everywhere access the results and hopes the responses will be reliable enough to predict the spread of the disease as well as give precise insights into how the disease is spreading.

Users will see a link at top of News Feed for the survey, insights from which can be used to decide the response to the crisis.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “By distributing surveys to large numbers of people whose identities we know, we can quickly generate enough signal to correct for biases and ensure sampling is done properly,”

Zuckerberg also said that Facebook has teamed up with researchers at New York University and the Mila research institute in Montreal to use cutting edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and help medical institutes in predicting the need for resources such as PPE and ventilators.