New AI tool is a potential timesaver for COVID-19 researchers

Northwestern University computer scientists are aiming to speed up treatments and vaccines for COVID-19--by making researchers' jobs easier. The team has developed a new tool that searches through scientific literature, predicting the most useful results for each user. After pulling documents of interest, the tool then uses artificial intelligence to generate a short, easy-to-skim summary of each paper. "Researchers can spend hours combing through documents and reading peer-reviewed papers," said Ning Wang, a graduate student who developed the tool. "Our tool provides the most salient details for academic articles rather than simply retrieving them. We hope this will be a time saver for researchers, guiding them to key information."