White House and researchers launch Covid-19 data hub

The free Open Research Dataset (CORD-19 ) includes over 29,000 scholarly articles about Covid-19, Sars-CoV-2 and the coronavirus group.

The White House has called on artificial intelligence researchers to develop ‘new text and data mining techniques’ with the aim of helping the scientific community answer questions relating to the virus.

Michael Kratsios, US chief technology officer, said: “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.

“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.”

The initiative wants researchers to apply recent advances in natural language processing to generate new insights from a large volume of scientific papers.  

Oren Etzioni, chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for AI, said: “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. 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.”

The CORD-19 resource is available on the Allen Institute’s SemanticScholar.org website and will be updated when new research is published in archival services and peer-reviewed publications.