Machine Learning Tool Could Provide Unexpected Scientific Insights into COVID-19

Berkeley Lab researchers (clockwise from top left) Kristin Persson, John Dagdelen, Gerbrand Ceder, and Amalie Trewartha led development of COVIDScholar, a text-mining tool for COVID-19-related scientific literature. A team of materials scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) – scientists who normally spend their time researching things like high-performance materials for thermoelectrics or battery cathodes – have built a text-mining tool in record time to help the global scientific community synthesize the mountain of scientific literature on COVID-19 being generated every day. The tool, live at covidscholar.org, The hope is that the tool could eventually enable "automated science." "On Google and other search engines people search for what they think is relevant," said Berkeley Lab scientist Gerbrand Ceder, one of the project leads.