COVID-19: White House Calls on AI Community to Aid in Coronavirus Mitigation Efforts

On March 16, the White House released a Call to Action to the artificial intelligence (AI) community on “New Machine Readable COVID-19 Dataset.” This comes following the release of a database of scholarly literature requested by The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) about COVID-19. The database is being led by a consortium of public and private organizations, including the National Institute of Health (NIH), and “represents the most extensive machine-readable Coronavirus literature collection available for data and text mining to date, with over 29,000 articles, more than 13,000 of which have full text.” With this database on hand, the White House is now calling on the AI community to develop new text and data mining techniques that can help professionals better utilize the data at hand in fighting coronavirus.

The White House has also included a set of key scientific questions related to COVID-19 in its Call to Action that was developed in coordination with the National Academies of Science and Engineering, along with additional organizations. AI professionals and organizations are asked to submit their data mining tools and insights via an online platform, which can be accessed in the Call to Action here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/call-action-tech-community-new-machine-readable-covid-19-dataset/.