A team of 5 engineers worked continuously for 12 hours to build a website about the corona virus for Vietnamese people, using AI to detect fake news.
The Corona.kompa.ai website development team consists of five people, some engineers are working in the US, the rest are in Vietnam. According to Mr. Vong Thanh Cuong, team leader, the biggest obstacle when building this website is how to connect the Data Science team in Silicon Valley and the development team in Vietnam.
“When WHO officially declared a global emergency, everyone was on holiday. The time zone difference between the two teams made the project difficult at the beginning. However, the members are all aware that this is necessary, so they put aside all their work to do it together,” Mr. Cuong said.
The idea of building a purely Vietnamese website originated from the fact that the world’s infection maps do not have a Vietnamese version. The number of infections and areas where people are sick in Vietnam are not updated in detail. More importantly, fake news about the epidemic on domestic social networks is increasing.
The whole team is determined to prioritize developing basic but necessary features first, then gradually upgrade and update later. The most important content is official statistics in the world as well as in Vietnam. Next is information and fake news related to the event. Therefore, the first version focuses on developing 3 features including: Global infection map; Infection map in Vietnam and news from official sources.
Once the direction was determined, with available technology and data, the team “assembled” it all quickly.
At 2:00 p.m. on January 30, a team of engineers in Vietnam began collecting all public conversations on social networks related to the corona virus. Two hours later, the Data Science team in the US and engineers in Vietnam analyzed to determine the topics users were most interested in based on Kompa’s available NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Big Data technology – the company’s Big Data technology.
At 8:00 p.m. the same day, a group of engineers in Silicon Valley sent sketches of the features needed for the first version and a preliminary design drawn by hand on paper. After that, the whole team continued to meet to develop the user interface. Because we didn’t have much time, the team decided to skip the interface design stage (UI/UX) and use a previously designed template.
On the night of January 30, a team of engineers in Vietnam began programming the data connection from the WHO, and at the same time edited a small component of information in the official press. The newspaper database has been developed and used by Kompa company for two years now, so it does not take much programming. The only problem at this time is that Vietnam’s data according to WHO is always slower than what the Ministry of Health of Vietnam announced, so engineers have to take more time to synchronize data, especially geographic information.
Because of the time zone difference and the urgency of the project, team members decided to work overnight. At 1:00 a.m. on January 31, engineers began reassembling the interface and processed data. After adjusting the interface and data to provide complete information for both PC and mobile versions.
“At 2:00 a.m. on January 31, the project was completed. We pressed the ‘Publish’ button to bring the website to the server in the US and officially announce it to users,” Mr. Vong Thanh Cuong said. The time from starting this website to publishing was 12 hours.
The most significant difference in Vietnam’s infection map compared to the world is the news section. Users can not only track the number of infections but also quickly update themselves with accurate and up-to-date information related to the pandemic, avoiding confusion caused by fake news on social media. In addition to the real-time global infection map, the website also provides a localized infection map for Vietnam. Everything is localized to make it easy for users to follow.
The system applies machine learning models to automatically update and classify official news related to the event. On the latest version, the team is testing analysis and evaluation of posts with high interactions on social networks. This is where fake news appears the most, causing confusion in the community. However, AI systems also need time to learn and improve accuracy.
After a week of launch, the website continuously reached its peak in traffic. Besides Vietnam, users from many other countries around the world also come here to update information.
“In the past, I often followed Wuhan’s coronavirus infection map, but it was still very difficult to see each country in detail. Then I found this information page, the interface is much more intuitive, it is very easy to track the number of infected cases, the number of deaths or recoveries in both the world and Vietnam,” said Tran Anh, an office worker in Ho Chi Minh City.
The group’s project also received many good reviews from the domestic technology community. Hung Tran, Founder of Got It, highly appreciated the website’s collection of official information. “In this situation, having good sources of information is extremely important, so that people can calmly assess the situation and have good plans instead of panicking. Tech people’s solutions are often very simple but practically effective,” he wrote on his personal page.
According to VnExpress: https://vnexpress.net/nguoi-viet-lam-web-ve-virus-corona-trong-12-tieng-4050805.html
