The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy has urged researchers to make use artificial intelligence to analyze up to 29,000 scholarly articles to give answers to key questions about the coronavirus.
The White House office said it had partnered with companies such as Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc’s Google to compile the most extensive database of scholarly articles about the virus available to researchers.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have said they want help to better understand the origins and transmission of the coronavirus in aid of developing a vaccine and treatments. The coronavirus causes a respiratory disease known as COVID-19.
The use of artificial intelligence will make the research very swift than humans and would also be able to reveal findings that humans may omit.
Machine learning which is a form of artificial intelligence in which software is designed to detect patterns in data on its own, is already in use in healthcare and other industries to develop summaries from large amounts of text. But before it can effectively draw conclusions, machine learning software sometimes needs to analyze millions of similar content items.
Only about 13,000 of the coronavirus articles are included in the new database in their entirety in a format that makes it easy for software to analyze. The database contains partial text, such as summaries, of the other 16,000 articles.
The database and researchers’ submissions are being hosted on Google’s Kaggle service, a popular tool for organizing machine learning competitions online.