AI leveraged to track coronavirus news

The tool, available at http://coronaviruswatch.ircai.org/ and powered by Event Registry, provides rolling coverage of news about coronavirus at the global level and for individual countries.

Users can follow media reports at the global level or zoom into any country to see what is going on there. The tool supports multiple languages.

It also gives an overview of the latest figures on the number of confirmed cases and deaths, but for that it uses World Health Organisation (WHO) data rather than media reports.

Marko Grobelnik, a researcher at the Jožef Stefan Institute, where the centre is based, told the STA the WHO data is not provided in real time but it is nevertheless used as a precaution to prevent misreporting the data.

"Typically it is reported in individual countries how many infections, deaths and recoveries there are. The WHO collects this once a day and reports on its web page, from where we source the data," he said.

In the coming days researchers plan to add multiple visualisations that will show the development of the spreading by country and comparisons between countries.

This will provide insight into multiple aspects of coronavirus in a way that is typically impossible with standard charts.

The International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence is a UNESCO-sponsored endeavour and the contract establishing it was signed last week.

It has already commenced some activities and once fully operational it will bring together AI stakeholders from around the world to support policy-makers and researchers in the field. It also plans to directly collaborate on major international projects in this field.