We are a globally distributed, volunteer-powered research organisation, trying to assist the medical community’s ability to answer key questions related to COVID-19
Artur Kiulian started CoronaWhy because he realized that we are all in this together. Now CoronaWhy is an international group of 1311 volunteers whose mission is to improve global coordination and analysis of all available data pertinent to the COVID-19 outbreak and ensure all findings reach those who need them.
It's impossible to list everyone out but we will eventually.
"The CORD-19 datasets are a real challenge for our data visualisation authors (using Power BI and similar tools) - they are both high volume and quite complex. Ordinary laptops are not up to the job, so we were running on a rag-tag collection of personal gaming machines and borrowed infrastructure. We also urgently needed to collaborate on a shared platform to produce consistent output. The team from JPL helped us out at just the right moment - offering a powerful Virtual Machine that can support multiple authors, with a fast internet connection. Now we feel confident in onboarding further authors into an environment where they can hit the ground running."
- Mike Honey,
DataViz Team
"The bureaucratic wheels can turn pretty slowly in larger organizations, so getting computational resources quickly enough to process our data in a meaningful way was difficult. EZP saved us by spinning up a server in no time and making it available. I was able to process millions of lines of unstructured data for more than 300 people to use in their machine learning and data analysis pipelines; without these resources, it would have taken weeks to get data for everyone to use, and those weeks potentially translate to lives at stake."
"GCP is great. Within CoronaWhy we generate lots of data and GCP Cloud Storage allowed us to very quickly setup a simple storage solution with access management. Then, in a span of just one week using GKE we were able to launch a kubernetes cluster with plethora of production grade services to cover majority of our teams' needs. Cherry on top, is ability to handle housekeeping task (f.e. SSL management) directly in GCP console"
- Anton Polishko,
CoronaWhy Computational Coordinator
"As a new organization with a Corona related domain name we get marked as "potentially a scam" by a lot of automated Algorithms. In our work to connect with policy makers, medical experts and other organizations this poses a huge problem.
CGI's donation of Liam Helmer's time as a security expert has been critical both for solving these issues and for strengthening our infrastructure to be robust enough for the sort of globally distributed production work we're engaged in."
- Daniel Lindenberger,
Communications Coordinator
"CoronaWhy opens new horizons for medical research with Big Data: We use the Slack messaging service to communicate internally. We make a daily video call with Zoom to coordinate and update the different work teams." Read More
"Machine-learning expert, Artur Kiulian, a Kaggle member in Los Angeles, is coordinating around 800 experts world-wide to work on different aspects of the data set." Read More
"CoronaWhy is an international group of 300+ volunteers whose mission is to improve global coordination and analysis of all available data pertinent to the COVID-19 outbreak and ensure all findings reach those who need them" Read More
"Now, more than ever, we need data scientists and developers to be trained for building AI that can eventually interpret data. And just as we want to be sure that medical drugs have been developed by highly qualified researchers and been used with instructions, we expect to have rules for using AI technologies and develop principles. AI can help researchers scour through the data to find potential treatments and other solutions, something that the CoronaWhy non-profit project is trying to accomplish." Read More
"One of the challenges, Kiulian says, is taking unstructured data combed from thousands of research papers and turning it into something more manageable." Read More
"We are observing a ‘data Renaissance’ period where previously unmotivated companies are forced to open up the channels of communication to establish meaningful cooperation,” Artur Kiulian, a Los Angeles-based artificial intelligence expert, said of the Biogen study. Kiulian is part of a “moon shot” project mobilizing volunteers from around the world to study COVID-19 data. He is answering the call from the White House Coronavirus Task Force to help. He has named his project CoronaWhy." Read More
"Story about how CoronaWhy got started" Read More
"Instead of having to drink from a firehose of questionable material, you can get a coffee cup of the most accurate, relevant information. It’s an artificial intelligence search engine”, Lindenberger explained to the Langley Advance Times. Read More
“A great analogy is hammers. It’s a tool and it doesn’t instruct you how to swing or where to hit but when you do use a hammer to hit a nail - it’s a game changer, and that’s exactly what we are doing right now” Watch it
In response to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, the White House and a coalition of leading research groups have prepared the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19).
CORD-19 is a freely available data-set of over 47,000 scholarly articles provided to the global research community to generate new insights in support of the ongoing fight against this infectious disease.
Research communities, like CoronaWhy, are applying recent advances in natural language processing, data mining tools, machine learning and other A.I. techniques, to help the medical community develop answers to high priority scientific questions.
CoronaWhy is working to help researchers answer four scientific questions (tasks) of the ten, made available on CORD-19.
CoronaWhy is working to help researchers answer four scientific questions (tasks) of the ten, made available on CORD-19.
Epidemiologist and an expert in Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals Market Research, skilled in such areas as: Public Health Research, Commercial Pharma Analytics, Population Health Management, Biostatistics, Clinical Research, Data Science & Advanced Analytics, Telehealth and mHealth.
Summary:
We need people with experience in virology, epidemics, biology and other related areas.
There is a lot of data that we need to pre-process and enrich.
We need to build traditional non-AI systems to help our ML pipeline.
People who work on the intersection of different subject domains such as, technology + medicine.
We, as a group, need to spread our mission to more effectively to organizations that can help us.
We need people who can take unstructured information and transform it into the actionable task.
We need people with traditional academic background, who are familiar with the process.
We need people who can communicate team needs and update daily progress reports.
If you’ve got the time and motivation, we have important but simple tasks ranging from data entry to google research and copy editing, that are needed. If you want to spread the word, we can help you as a CoronaWhy ambassador.
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