As pandemic continues to spread throughout, the White House has decided to publicize 29,000 scholarly papers written on COVID-19 to AI experts for thorough analysis that could offer valuable insights in how to deal with the issue.
The government of the U.S hope for researchers to come forward from around the world and develop new text and data mining techniques which will help scientists and researchers to answer crucial questions about the virus such as its origins, transmission methods, transmission rate and a potential cure.
A number of questions have been published on Kaggle, and a hackathon has been organized by the name CORD-19 (COVID-19 Open Research Dataset ) which will allow participants to look into the papers and discover new insights. A number of questions have been listed on Kaggle such as:
- What is known about transmission, incubation, and environmental stability?
- What do we know about COVID-19 risk factors?
- What do we know about virus genetics, origin, and evolution?
- What has been published about ethical and social science considerations?
- What do we know about diagnostics and surveillance?
- What do we know about non-pharmaceutical interventions?
- What has been published about medical care?
- What has been published about information sharing and inter-sectoral collaboration?
- What do we know about vaccines and therapeutics?
The CORD-19 dataset has also been made available on SemanticScholar and will be updated whenever a new research article is published in archival services. CORD-19 has been put together by a number of organizations after a request made by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Pre-publication content was provided by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative while the National Library of Medicine provided literature content. On the other hand, Allen Institute of AI transformed the content into a machine-readable format, and all of this was coordinated by Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
As per the White House, CORD-19 is the world’s most extensive machine-readable coronavirus literature available free for data and text mining. But there are some other papers as well that has been made public by organizations such as the Chinese scientific journal database Chongqing VIP Information, which has made its academic papers free during the pandemic. To attract more participants, Kaggle is also offering a reward of $1000 prize for the best answer to each question.
