What does Palantir combine with Tiberius on vaccines?
Tiberius, Palantir's software platform for the distribution of vaccines to the US population, analyzed by experts and observers. Facts, comments and controversies
Tiberius, as the middle name of Captain James Tiberius Kirk from Star Trek.
This is the name of the software platform developed by thecontroversial data mining company Palantir to "help local health officials decide where to allocate vaccine doses" against Covid in the United States.
As the Department of Defense explained , “Tiberius was developed specifically for Operation Warp Speed, the collaborative effort led by the Department of Health and Human Services and the DoD to develop, manufacture and deliver safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines to Americans ".
In an effort to meet the goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans by the first quarter of 2021, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has partnered with the Palantir company to develop a software platform called Tiberius.
State and local health officials said the Tiberius system could help identify high priority populations and then assign doses to health workers, the elderly and others at higher risk of infection.
But according to the Venturebeat newspaper , the algorithms (including the one behind Tiberius) can encode biases against certain demographic groups, particularly minorities and low-income people.
All the details.
PALANTIR'S WORK FOR TIBERIUS
To track the distribution of vaccines, the US government has developed a new software platform called Tiberius.
The software will help the federal government allocate the amount of vaccines each state will receive and local officials will use Tiberius to "decide where each assigned dose will go, from local doctors' offices to large medical centers," the Defense Department note explains .
WHAT THE TIBERIUS SOFTWARE DOES
Tiberius then allows states and federal agencies to see their orders and monitor vaccine doses. The program covers 50 states, eight territories, the Veterans Health Administration, the Bureau of Prisons, the Indian Health Service, and the defense and state departments.
The platform is based on the work that Palantir, the most controversial Californian data mining company with deep ties to US intelligence and military agencies,recently landed on Wall Street.
CONTRIBUTES TO THE DECISION
Tiberius allows each state health department to "see all of their suppliers registered there and they can dive in and really go into detail on how to make decisions about where to send the vaccine within their jurisdiction," explained Deacon Maddox, army colonel. retired, now head of the plans of Operation Warp Speed.
Paraphrasing, the state health authority decides the subjects to be subjected to the anti-Covid vaccines through the data of Tiberius.
TRACKING VACCINES
As the Defense Department note explains, every Thursday, vaccine manufacturers inform Operation Warp Speed about how much vaccine is available for the following week.
On Friday, Tiberius runs an algorithm that taps into variables including adult population and vaccine uptake and assigns the number of available doses to each state.
On Saturday, each state finalizes their orders and deliveries arrive on Monday.
HOW THE PALANTIR AGORITHM WORKS
Deacon Maddox, described Tiberius's algorithm as "simple", "fair" and "right".
According to Maddox, it takes "risk-adjusted" production estimates as input, a small portion from which it is subtracted to provide a "safety stock" and the rest is divided by population estimates from the 2018 American Community Survey. US Census Bureau .
THE SOURCES AT THE BASE OF TIBERIUS
The Tiberius platform then collects and displays data from the US Census Bureau (it is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce that deals with censuses), the Department of Health and Human Services, the state health offices and by the CDC.
As VentureBeat points out, although it is impossible to know exactly which variables Tiberius's algorithm takes into account in its decisions – this information is not public – its dependence on US Census Bureau data is cause for concern.
THE UNDERESTIMATION OF BLACK MEN IN THE USA
“Due to time constraints, labor shortages and other confounding factors, the Census Bureau regularly underestimates populations in some regions of the country. For example, studies have shown that underestimation for black men, particularly those aged 30 to 49, is much higher than the net underestimation rate for the total black population or for the total male population, ”explains VentureBeat. .
The impact could be devastating, according to the newspaper. “According to data from Johns Hopkins University, black Americans are infected with Covid-19 at a rate nearly three times that of white Americans and are more than twice as likely to die from the virus. This is partly due to the fact that blacks are more likely to have pre-existing conditions that predispose them to infections, less likely to have health insurance, and more likely to work in jobs that don't allow remote work, ” VentureBeat points out.
THE FEARS OF OS KEYES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
As mentioned, Palantir's Tiberius software provides planning tools for states to optimize their vaccine allocation and distribution plans.
Based on the priority recommendations, Tiberius provides decision support to leaders across the country, drawing on data including planning information provided by jurisdictions.
“There is the issue of underestimation and overestimation. [The algorithm] does not only affect the assessments of how many doses are needed in a particular area, but also the priority of those doses, ”Os Keyes, an artificial intelligence researcher in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering, told VentureBeat. 'University of Washington. “If you don't include vulnerable populations that often, you are underestimating the population, which means you have a false sense of geographic density. Furthermore, in your sense of geographic density you lack the people who, due to their treatment and their lives, are more likely to live in dense housing, low-quality housing, places where social distancing is particularly difficult, and inequalities of pre-existing health conditions that exacerbate vulnerability to Covid are particularly high ".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/palantir-tiberius-vaccini/ on Mon, 21 Dec 2020 14:56:22 +0000.