COVID-19 Roundup: Dashboards, Datasets, Data Mining & More

As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps the globe, big data and AI have emerged as crucial tools for everything from diagnosis and epidemiology to therapeutic and vaccine development. Here, we collect the latest news in how big data is fighting back against COVID-19.

Sandia National Laboratories enables desktop data mining for COVID-19 research

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have assembled a combination of data mining, machine learning algorithms, and compression-based analytics to help the research community comb through the tens of thousands of articles published about COVID-19 since the pandemic began. In their initial test, they filtered 29,000 studies down to 87 relevant papers within ten minutes. To read more, click here.

Researchers call for better data collection to support COVID-19 behavioral research

Researchers writing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine have issued an interdisciplinary call to action to strengthen the behavioral science response to COVID-19 through more funding and better data collection. To read more, click here.

PerkinElmer launches open-access COVID-19 data dashboards for therapeutics research

PerkinElmer has announced that it has launched two online, open-access COVID-19 data dashboards to help accelerate the development of COVID-19 antivirals and vaccines. The first dashboard, the PerkinElmer COVID-19 Drug Compound Dashboard, helps scientists narrow down drug compounds; the second dashboard, the PerkinElmer COVID-19 Clinical Trial Dashboard, helps them sort through clinical trials. To read more, click here.

Georgia Tech helps bring COVID-19 dashboards to the CDC

Developers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute have helped bring COVID-19 data dashboards to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The first dashboard, which is now publicly available, tracks the relationship between human mobility and COVID-19 transmission area-by-area. To read more, click here.

DARPA taps Duality Technologies to develop machine learning for COVID-19 research

Privacy technology provider Duality Technologies has been tapped by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a privacy-preserving machine learning tool that can be applied to researching genomic susceptibility to severe COVID-19 symptoms. “This contract award supports Duality’s commitment to promoting responsible, privacy-preserving use of big data for the public good and for national security,” said Dr. Kurt Rohloff, Co-founder and CTO, Duality Technologies. To read more, click here.

University of California Health creates centralized dataset to accelerate COVID-19 research

University of California Health has developed a unified, secure dataset for use in COVID-19 research using electronic health records from across its academic health system. Containing more than 460 million data points, the dataset is accessible to researchers across the California university system, helping researchers and doctors compare treatment options from previous cases to better treat future patients. To read more, click here.

Report finds that COVID-19 stay-at-home orders drove changes in smartphone behavior

Strategy Analytics research has found that the app usage patterns of smartphone users in the United States significantly changed when those users were faced with COVID-19-driven stay-at-home orders. App use increased by more than six hours per month, predominantly due to growth in use of social networking apps and mobile browsing. To learn more, click here.

Do you know about big data applications for COVID-19 that should be featured on this list? If so, send us an email at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.