The big data ecosystem has come out strong to help combat the global coronavirus pandemic by opening up their products and services to organizations that plan to carry out COVID-19 research. In this article, I’ve listed a number of the recent announcements along these lines. Kudos to all the vendors listed below, you may just make an important difference in getting the world past these trying times!
Data Science Propels Coronavirus Research: Domino Data Lab Opens Platform for Data Scientists Advancing COVID-19 Research
Domino Data Lab, provider of the open data science platform for large enterprises, announced that it is extending complimentary access to its Domino data science platform to organizations that are advancing the collective understanding of the COVID-19 virus, its spread, and approaches to lessening its destructive effects across the population.
Researchers can access the project on Domino that is pre-populated with several datasets including the Center for Disease Control and Prevention Fluview, and the Johns Hopkins University 2019 Novel Coronavirus data repository. Those interested in participating can view and sign up for access to the COVID-19 infectious disease data project, and request expanded use of Domino for COVID-19 research in the blue dialogue box once they are registered.
The company has the benefit of working alongside data science teams at many of the top health and life science companies, and top universities globally that are at the forefront of battling COVID-19. Leading health and life sciences organizations with more than 1,500 data scientists active on Domino today are researching COVID-19 treatments, while finance, insurance, automotive, technology, and retail clients conduct a host of other virus analyses with implications across industries.
Domino’s data science platform offers data scientists the capacity to build, test and adapt their models in an open platform with the flexibility to use their preferred tools from open source technologies including R and Python, and established providers including SAS and Matlab on the first Kubernetes-native data science workbench. Together, data scientists remotely develop, test and deploy models in collaboration with colleagues worldwide—all with full reproducibility of experiments. IT teams are relieved because the unified platform allows them to support and provision environments as needed in a single pane of glass while using the most efficient compute in the cloud or on premise.
“Data is being generated and updated in almost real-time. Speed is critical in modeling and learning from these updates,” said Josh Poduska, Chief Data Scientist at Domino Data Lab. “It’s not so much a matter of not having enough data, but of not being able to digest all of the data points simultaneously gathered across the world into self-learning models, to build a better collective understanding of the disease by sharing those data models and learnings.”
C3.ai COVID-19 Data Lake Available to All Researchers
A variety of diverse structured and unstructured data sets are aggregated into a unified, federated image, easily accessible and useful to researchers for applying advanced analytics and artificial intelligence. The C3.ai COVID-19 Data Lake will be made publicly available at no cost to the global research community. The open data sets will be accessible at https://c3.ai/covid via any utility that supports access through a RESTful API using common tools such as Python, R, Ex Machina, Microsoft Power BI, etc.
In addition, the C3.ai COVID-19 Data Lake will be immediately accessible to researchers and organizations currently utilizing the C3 AI Suite, including member academic institutions and researchers through the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (C3.ai DTI).
The global research and developer communities are invited to help expand the scale of the C3.ai COVID-19 Data Lake by enhancing its functionality, developing analytics and predictive models, and by contributing additional COVID-related data sets through a crowdsourcing model.
“We are pleased to make this contribution to the global COVID-19 research effort,” said Thomas M. Siebel, CEO of C3.ai. “It is our hope that this resource will rapidly expand in scope and functionality to help researchers address this unprecedented pandemic.”
2021.AI opens up the Grace Data and AI Platform to accelerate the response to COVID-19
An increasing number of people across multiple types of research institutions and companies are leveraging data-driven approaches to tackle the different problems under the COVID-19 outbreak. While many researchers and companies are working on individual projects and models, there is a tremendous potential in uniting efforts by sharing results to accelerate and improve findings, and ultimately achieve higher efficiency and better results. Collaboration and joint contributions are so much more powerful.
2021.AI will offer a collaborative AI platform to assist in fighting the COVID-19 crisis. By accelerating collaboration across communities, such as academic institutions, governmental institutions, and companies, 2021.AI offers free access to the Grace AI Platform, preloaded with a range of public data sets and standard AI models. By opening up the platform for collaboration, more people will have the opportunity to contribute and directly address COVID-19 related problems.
In addition to the Grace AI Platform, 2021.AI will offer access and free data science expertise, training, and support for AI model development. This will be delivered together with Neural, a Danish data science organization, who are joining this initiative with their members’ cross-disciplinary competencies within data science and medicine.
2021.AI believes that almost all data research and development efforts can be much more efficient when supported by data sciences expertise to substantially accelerate the development of new data, AI solutions and innovative thinking.
“We have a clear ambition with this project, which is to contribute directly with our assets and resources to assist in fighting the COVID-19 crisis. Our Grace Platform and data science expertise can both, directly and indirectly, impact COVID-19 related projects, supporting as many as possible with the new insights and solutions. The keywords here are cross-disciplinary collaboration and joint contributions making all contributors more powerful and efficient in tackling COVID-19 crisis projects,” says Mikael Munck, Founder and CEO at 2021.AI.
John Snow Labs is making all its licensed softwares – Spark NLP for Healthcare, the Healthcare AI Platform, and the Curated Datasets – available for free to data scientists who are actively tackling COVID-19
John Snow Labs is making all its licensed software – Spark NLP for Healthcare, the Healthcare AI Platform, and the Curated Datasets – available for free to data scientists who are actively tackling COVID-19.
The license is available for request here. Data scientists applying to this promotion will have to demonstrate their project’s impact in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic on the behalf of their company. The full Spark NLP for Healthcare gives you access to state-of-the-art:
- Clinical named entity recognition – train your own or use pre-trained models to extract clinical facts (symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, procedures), drug facts (name, strength, dosage, route, frequency, duration), and biomedical terms (organism, tissue, gene, gene product, chemical, etc.).
- Assertion status detection – telling between positive assertions (“patient has diabetes”), negative assertions (“no fever”), uncertain assertions (“shows indications of depression”), or assertions about other people (“family history of lung cancer”).
- Entity resolution – train your own or use pre-trained models to resolve recognized entities to SNOMED-CT, ICD-10-CM, ICD-10-PCS, CPT, or RxNorm.
- De-identification – Anonymize either structured tables or unstructured free text including all HIPAA-required fields and then either remove, mask, or obfuscate PHI.
- OCR – accurately transform PDF and image files to digital text with a built-in algorithms for image pre-processing (binarizer, thresholding, erosion, scaling, skew correction), image cleansing (noise scorer, remove objects, morphology), and handling of complex document layouts (LayoutAnalyzer, SplitRegions, DrawRegions, PositionFinder).
If you’re also looking for an air-gap, end-to-end AI platform for analyzing PHI at scale – our Healthcare AI Platform is freely available as well.
The company is named after Dr. John Snow – the medical doctor who helped stop the outbreak of cholera in 1854 London by analyzing data. It exists for the very purpose of empowering many more like him in the 21st century. It will take all of us to end COVID-19.
Core Scientific Gives COVID-19 Researchers Free Access to AI Infrastructure as a Service powered by NetApp and NVIDIA
None of us have faced a threat like this before. But it’s also an opportunity for the world to come together and combine our resources around a common goal. AI and genomic studies are one essential tool in combating the pandemic. To help researchers accelerate their AI-based genomics research, Core Scientific will provide free 30-day access to ONTAP AI to help researchers take advantage of NVIDIA’s GPU computing combined with NetApp’s cloud connected all flash storage systems to use NVIDIA Parabricks for GPU-accelerated novel coronavirus related research.
The NetApp ONTAP AI solution is built on NVIDIA DGX AI systems and NetApp Flash Based Storage, in combination with the Plexus AI stack from Core Scientific. Plexus provides easy, portal-based access to researchers, with a rich library of data science tools. The infrastructure is cloud-connected, secure, and up and running. It’s ready to be connected to researchers’ data sets anywhere, and be put to work for researchers immediately.
Lunit Releases Its AI Online to Support Healthcare Professionals Manage COVID-19
Lunit, a medical AI software company that develops AI-powered analysis of lung diseases via chest x-ray images, announced that it will be releasing its software online, free of charge, to help healthcare professionals manage coronavirus.
Coronavirus is known to cause pneumonia, which can be found as “consolidation” on chest x-ray images. The software, developed by Lunit, is an AI solution for chest x-ray analysis, detecting 10 different radiologic findings including lung nodule, consolidation, and more with 97-99% accuracy. For the online release, the company is providing consolidation findings only, which is suggestive of coronavirus-related pneumonia.
“We hope our decision to publicly release a special version of our software can help ease the strain in the healthcare system in countries around the world,” said Brandon Suh, CEO of Lunit. “Our AI solution has been in use at coronavirus care centers in South Korea, which is one of the countries that are successfully “flattening the curve” by applying diverse and innovative measures in the battle against the virus.”
COVID Intelligent Insight Research Tool
In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, Sinequa has dedicated our time and technology to create a scientific research tool called COVID Intelligent Insight. The goal is to help scientific and medical professionals surface insights and analyze information across the many sources of rapidly-evolving scientific research papers and publications so that you can sift through all the content and quickly get to the information you need.
The COVID Intelligent Insight portal is an open, free, and collaborative scientific search portal to gather the most useful and relevant information related to the virus. The portal includes the largest repository of its kind, with over 70,000 papers, articles, and publications specifically focused on COVID-19 and SARS-CoV2.
MariaDB Announces Free Offering to Help Fight COVID-19
MariaDB announced a new program offering free access to the just-announced MariaDB SkySQL. The program will help healthcare, medical, academic and nonprofits that are fighting COVID-19 and need enterprise-grade analytical capabilities to power data discovery.
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