White House Urges AI Experts to Develop Tools for COVID-19 Dataset

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has issued a call to action for experts to build artificial intelligence tools that can be applied to a new COVID-19 dataset.

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Requested by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the dataset represents the most extensive machine-readable coronavirus literature collection available for data mining to date. The dataset includes over 29,000 articles, more than 13,000 of which have full text.

The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) was put together by researchers from the Allen Institute for AI, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CHI), Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Microsoft, and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at NIH.

“Decisive action from America’s science and technology enterprise is critical to prevent, detect, treat, and develop solutions to COVID-19. The White House will continue to be a strong partner in this all hands-on-deck approach,” said Michael Kratsios, US Chief Technology Officer, the White House.

“We thank each institution for voluntarily lending its expertise and innovation to this collaborative effort, and call on the United States research community to put artificial intelligence technologies to work in answering key scientific questions about the novel coronavirus.”

To build the dataset, researchers used Microsoft’s web-scale literature curation tools to identify and gather worldwide scientific efforts and results. CZI provided access to pre-publication content, NLM provided access to literature content, and the Allen AI team transformed this content into a machine-readable form, making the data ready for analysis and study.

“It’s all-hands on deck as we face the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Dr. Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft.

“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.”

The CORD-19 resource will continue to be updated as new research is published in archival services and peer-reviewed publications. Researchers interested in submitting the text and data mining tools they develop can do so via the Kaggle platform, a machine learning and data science community owned by Google Cloud. Through Kaggle, these tools will be made available to researchers around the world.

“It’s difficult for people to manually go through more than 20,000 articles and synthesize their findings. 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,” said Anthony Goldbloom, co-Founder and chief executive officer at Kaggle.

To better inform the call to action, researchers collaborated with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21^st Century Health Threats and the World Health Organization to develop key scientific questions related to COVID-19.

The questions aim to discover what is known about COVID-19 transmission, risk factors, origin, diagnostics, and other critical information.

“Sharing vital information across scientific and medical communities is key to accelerating our ability to respond to the coronavirus pandemic,” said Dr. Cori Bargmann, head of science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. “The new COVID-19 Open Research Dataset will help researchers worldwide to access important information faster.”

Kaggle is sponsoring a $1,000 per task award to the winner whose submission best meets the evaluation criteria. The winner may choose to receive this award as a monetary payment or as a charitable donation to COVID-19 research efforts.

With the development of this dataset, researchers expect to advance their understanding of COVID-19 and its impact on patient populations.

“One of the most immediate and impactful applications of AI is in the ability to help scientists, academics, and technologists find the right information in a sea of scientific papers to move research faster. We applaud the OSTP, WHO, NIH and all organizations that are taking a proactive approach to use the most advanced technology in the fight against COVID-19,” said Dr. Oren Etzioni, chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for AI. 

“The Allen Institute for AI, and particularly the Semantic Scholar team, is committed to updating and improving this important resource and the associated AI methods the community will be using to tackle this crucial problem.”

New AI tools will help accelerate COVID-19 research and relief, paving the way for medicine in the future.

“This valuable new resource is the fruit of unselfish collaboration and now offers the opportunity to find answers to important questions about COVID-19,” said Dr. Dewey Murdick, Director of Data Science at CSET, who coordinated the cross-team effort. “Once the crisis has passed, we hope this project will inspire new ways to use machine learning to advance scientific research.”