The White House on March 16 joined Microsoft, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Allen Institute for AI, among others, in issuing a call to action to artificial intelligence experts to develop new text and data mining techniques that can help researchers tackle COVID-19 scientific questions.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy requested the development of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, which includes research information on COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 and the Coronavirus group. The machine-readable coronavirus literature is available for data and text mining, and the dataset comprises more than 29,000 articles.
Coordinated by Washington, D.C.-based Georgetown University, the dataset was developed in collaboration with Microsoft, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Allen Institute for AI and the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.
Researchers who submit AI tools for the dataset via the Kaggle platform, which is a machine learning and data science community owned by Google Cloud. The text and data mining tools will be openly available for researchers on a global scale.
"It's all-hands on deck as we face the COVID-19 pandemic," said Eric Horvitz, MD, chief scientific officer at Microsoft, according to the news release. "We need to come together as companies, governments and scientists and work to bring our best technologies to bear across biomedicine, epidemiology, AI and other sciences. The COVID-19 literature resource and challenge will stimulate efforts that can accelerate the path to solutions on COVID-19."