AI vs. Coronavirus: How artificial intelligence is now helping in the fight against COVID-19

Artificial intelligence often raises concerns about privacy, bias and trickery in areas such as facial recognition and deep fake videos. But amidst the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, some technology companies and scientists are looking to AI for a positive impact instead. "AI and high tech in general have gotten something of a bad rap recently, but this crisis shows how AI can potentially do a world of good," said Oren Etzioni, CEO of Seattle's Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and a University of Washington computer science professor. Etzioni was speaking on a call Monday organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as part of an announcement of a project called the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, aka CORD-19. The initiative, building on AI2's Semantic Scholar project, uses natural language processing to analyze scientific papers about coronavirus, including the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.