The number of studies about COVID-19 has risen exponentially from the start of the pandemic, from around 20,000 in early March to over 30,000 as of late June. In an effort to help clinicians digest the vast amount of biomedical knowledge in the literature, researchers affiliated with Columbia, Brandeis, Darpa, UCLA, and UIUC developed a framework -- COVID-KG -- that draws on papers to answer natural language questions about drug purposing and more. The sheer volume of COVID-19 research makes it difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. Some false information has been promoted on social media and in publication venues like journals. And many results about the virus from different labs and sources are redundant, complementary, or would appear to conflict.

In order to help government agencies, academic institutions and healthcare organizations handle the influx of calls and messages regarding the coronavirus, IBM has announced that it will provide a bundle of Watson services for free. The company will combine Watson Assistant, which uses IBM Research's natural language processing technology, with Watson Discovery to create IBM Watson Assistant for Citizens. The new Watson suite will be available online and on smartphones and will be free for at least 90 days. According to IBM, wait times for coronavirus-related questions are exceeding two hours, so the company believes that using AI via Watson may be able to help speed up response times. "While helping government agencies and healthcare institutions use AI to get critical information out to their citizens remains a high priority right now, the current environment has made it clear that every business in every industry should find ways to digitally engage with their clients and employees. With today's news, IBM is taking years of experience in helping thousands of global businesses and institutions use Natural Language Processing and other advanced AI technologies to better meet the demands of their constituents, and now applying it to the COVID-19 crisis. AI has the power to be your assistant during this uncertain time."