A couple of weeks after the Coronavirus outbreak and the disease has become a full-blown pandemic. According to official Chinese statistics, more than 130 people have died from the mysterious virus.

Contagious diseases may be diagnosed by men and women in face masks and lab coats, but warning signs of an epidemic can be detected by computer programmers sitting thousands of miles away. Around the tenth of January, news of a flu outbreak in China’s Hubei province started making its way to mainstream media. It then spread to other parts of the country, and subsequently, overseas.

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But the first to report of an impending biohazard was BlueDot, a Canadian firm that specializes in infectious disease surveillance. They predicted an impending outbreak of coronavirus on December 31 using an artificial intelligence-powered system that combs through animal and plant disease networks, news reports in vernacular websites, government documents, and other online sources to warn its clients against traveling to danger zones like Wuhan, much before foreign governments started issuing travel advisories.

They further used global airline ticketing data to correctly predict that the virus would spread to Seoul, Bangkok, Taipei, and Tokyo. Machine learning and natural language processing techniques were also employed to create models that process large amounts of data in real time. This includes airline ticketing data, news reports in 65 languages, animal and plant disease networks.