British engineering firm Rolls Royce is leading a mammoth analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on businesses worldwide, as the country’s politicians ponder how best to equip the private sector for a post-pandemic world.
The Emer2gent Alliance will track the recovery of around 800,000 brands amid the Coronavirus crisis. Google Cloud, IBM, Truata and The Data City have joined the alliance, whose foundation was announced yesterday.
Emer2gent will combine economic and retail big data with behavioral analytics, to build a picture of a British economy set to endure its worst downturn in modern history. Its findings will help the British government decide how best to return to economic normality once social and business restrictions are lifted. A global expansion is planned thereafter.
“We will be using our Machine Learning platform to enable granular analysis of how different sectors are affected, which sectors are recovering quickly and which are most in need of help,” said The Data City co-founder Alex Craven. “We’ll be publishing this as open data to the Emer2gent Alliance as a weekly update to enable economic policy decision makers to see how things are changing over time.”
Results of the project will be posted at Emer2gent’s website and GitHub. “We want the world economy to get better as soon as possible so people can get back to work,” R2 Data Labs global director Carole Gorski told VentureBeat. “Our data innovation community can help do this and is at its best when it comes together for the common good.”