General Intelligence

Computer Scientists Are Building Algorithms to Tackle COVID-19

Algorithms that can detect infections, differentiate COVID-19 from the common flu, and more

Dave Gershgorn
OneZero
Published in
3 min readMar 13, 2020

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Photo: Sompong Rattanakunchon/Getty Images

More than 125,000 people have been confirmed to have the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, around the world and the number is likely to drastically increase, according to health professionals.

Computer scientists and machine learning researchers are tackling the pandemic the way they know how: compiling datasets and building algorithms to learn from them.

There’s already a dataset of COVID-19 cases on Google’s data science competition platform Kaggle, which is updated with new cases daily. The data is robust, including patient age, location, when they started to experience symptoms, when they were exposed, when they entered a hospital, and many more. Nearly 300 people have used the data in their own analyses.

A researcher from the University of Montreal has collected and published a database of dozens of CT scans and chest X-ray images. The images are taken from publicly available studies on the disease.

And Johns Hopkins University has built an impressive dashboard of well-sourced data that’s updated regularly, giving a global look…

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Dave Gershgorn
OneZero

Senior Writer at OneZero covering surveillance, facial recognition, DIY tech, and artificial intelligence. Previously: Qz, PopSci, and NYTimes.