Artificial intelligence recruited to find clues about Covid-19

The Pan American Health Organisation/World Health Organisation building in Washington. The Allen Institute's Semantics Scholar website will host the database of scientific articles and add to the collection over time, while Kaggle's platform, which provides access to about 4 million artificial intelligence researchers, will receive suggestions from the experts on tools and codes to use to mine the database, experts from both organisations said. — CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images/TNS

WASHINGTON: US health and technology specialists on March 16 said they had launched a new collaborative venture to assemble a dataset of tens of thousands of scientific papers and literature on the coronavirus, which would then be analysed by artificial intelligence programs to find patterns and answer questions raised by the World Health Organisation about the pandemic.

The dataset includes 29,000 articles, including 13,000 full-text pieces of medical literature, which will be made available on a special website allowing data scientists and artificial intelligence programmers to propose tools and software code that can unearth insights from the articles, White House officials and experts told reporters in a conference call.