AI to Help in the Battle against COVID-19
Health and Technology Specialists have launched a venture called the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset to assemble data pulled from tens of thousands of scientific articles written about the coronavirus, to then have artificial intelligence help answer questions related to the virus. The goal of the initiative is to try and find patterns, and answer questions raised by the World Health Organization about COVID-19.
The venture will include entities such as the National Library of Medicine, Microsoft, Allen Institute of AI, the Georgetown University Center for Security and Emerging Technology, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Kaggle.
The data used in the AI effort will include 29,000 articles which will be made available to data scientists and artificial intelligence programmers. The scientists and programmers would then propose tools and code to help extract the data.
By mining this data, Data Scientists and Machine Language experts will be able to help federal officials do things such as develop vaccines, and form appropriate guidelines on how long social distancing should be practiced and more.
The Allen Institute’s Semantics Scholar website will host the collection of scientific literature, and add to the database over time with more information. Kaggle, which is a unit of Google and provides access to approximately 4 million AI researchers, will receive suggestions from experts on tools and code to mine the data.
“Scientists have been working and publishing their findings on various strains of coronavirus over the years, including other variants such as SARS, MERS, and the latest COVID-19. The application of artificial intelligence tools to look for commonalities and differences among the thousands of such published articles will help scientists spot things they may have missed,” says Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft.
“It’s difficult for people to manually go through more than 20,000 articles and synthesize their findings,” according to Co-Founder and CEO of Kaggle, Anthony Goldbloom. “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. Our hope is that AI can be used to help find answers to a key set of questions about COVID-19.”
Cori Bargmann, Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative says “Sharing vital information across scientific and medical communities is key to accelerating our ability to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. The new COVID-19 Open Research Dataset will help researchers worldwide to access important information faster.”
Experts said that publishers of scientific journals and literature will be publishing their full articles so that they are available to researchers and AI. This will allow machines the ability to look for key insights to help us learn more about coronavirus, and how we can combat it.
Story via Medical Xpress
