AI Empowers Answers to COVID-19 Questions

As requested by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, innovative tech leaders have released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), representing the most extensive machine-readable coronavirus literature collection available, with over 29,000 articles, more than 13,000 of which have full text.

The nation’s artificial intelligence experts said on March 16, 2020, these new text and data mining techniques that can help the science community answer high-priority scientific questions related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, and the COVID-19 disease.

These AI leaders include the Allen Institute for AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Microsoft, and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health, and the Coronavirus group.

This data management innovation was constructed via a unique collaboration between Microsoft, NLM, CZI, and the Allen Institute for AI, coordinated by Georgetown University. 

Microsoft’s web-scale literature curation tools were used to identify and bring together worldwide scientific efforts and results, CZI provided access to pre-publication content, NLM provided access to literature content, and the Allen AI team transformed the content into machine-readable form, making the corpus ready for analysis and study.

The CORD-19 resource is available on the Allen Institute’s Semantic Scholar website and will continue to be updated as new research is published in archival services and peer-reviewed publications. 

Researchers should submit the text and data mining tools and insights they develop in response to this call to action via the Kaggle platform. 

Through Kaggle, a machine learning and data science community owned by Google Cloud, these tools will be openly available for researchers around the world.

To inform the call to action, key scientific questions related to COVID-19 were developed in coordination with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats and the World Health Organization. The call to action and key questions are both available on Kaggle.

“Decisive action from America’s science and technology enterprise is critical to prevent, detect, treat, and develop solutions to COVID-19,” said Michael Kratsios, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, The White House.

“This valuable new resource is the fruit of unselfish collaboration and now offers the opportunity to find answers to important questions about COVID-19,” said Dr. Dewey Murdick, Director of Data Science at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), who coordinated the cross-team effort. 

“Once the crisis has passed, we hope this project will inspire new ways to use machine learning to advance scientific research.”

“Our hope is that AI can be used to help find answers to a key set of questions about COVID-19,” said Anthony Goldbloom, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Kaggle.

“It’s difficult for people to manually go through more than 20,000 articles and synthesize their findings. Recent advances in technology can be helpful here. We’re putting machine-readable versions of these articles in front of our community of more than 4 million data scientists.”

For more information about the novel Coronavirus and COVID-19, please visit Coronavirus.gov.

SARS-CoV-2 outbreak news published by Coronavirus Today.