On Monday, the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy challenged researchers to use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to analyze about 29,000 scholarly articles to answer key questions about the coronavirus. The White House Office announced that it had partnered with companies such as Microsoft and Alphabet's Google to collect the most extensive database of scholarly articles about the virus available to researchers. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have said they want help to better understand the origins and transmission of the coronavirus in aid of developing a vaccine and treatments. The US Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios, who works in the White House, told reporters on a conference call that the hope is that computers will be able to scan the research more quickly than humans and uncover findings that humans may miss. Machine Learning, a form of AI in which software is designed to detect patterns in data on its own, is already used in healthcare and other industries to develop summaries from large amounts of text.

The White House has urged AI experts to analyze a dataset of 29,000 scholarly articles about coronavirus that could offer insights into how to manage the pandemic. These questions have been published on Kaggle, a machine learning community owned by Google. The entire COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) has been made available on SemanticScholar, a free, nonprofit, academic search engine. The collection will be updated whenever new research is published in archival services and peer-reviewed publications. "Decisive action from America's science and technology enterprise is critical to prevent, detect, treat, and develop solutions to COVID-19," said Michael Kratsios, the USA's Chief Technology Officer.