No Arabic abstract
The global pandemic of COVID-19 has made the public pay close attention to related news, covering various domains, such as sanitation, treatment, and effects on education. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 condition is very different among the countries (e.g., policies and development of the epidemic), and thus citizens would be interested in news in foreign countries. We build a system for worldwide COVID-19 information aggregation containing reliable articles from 10 regions in 7 languages sorted by topics. Our reliable COVID-19 related website dataset collected through crowdsourcing ensures the quality of the articles. A neural machine translation module translates articles in other languages into Japanese and English. A BERT-based topic-classifier trained on our article-topic pair dataset helps users find their interested information efficiently by putting articles into different categories.
We present CAiRE-COVID, a real-time question answering (QA) and multi-document summarization system, which won one of the 10 tasks in the Kaggle COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge, judged by medical experts. Our system aims to tackle the recent challenge of mining the numerous scientific articles being published on COVID-19 by answering high priority questions from the community and summarizing salient question-related information. It combines information extraction with state-of-the-art QA and query-focused multi-document summarization techniques, selecting and highlighting evidence snippets from existing literature given a query. We also propose query-focused abstractive and extractive multi-document summarization methods, to provide more relevant information related to the question. We further conduct quantitative experiments that show consistent improvements on various metrics for each module. We have launched our website CAiRE-COVID for broader use by the medical community, and have open-sourced the code for our system, to bootstrap further study by other researches.
The COVID-19 pandemic is the worst pandemic to strike the world in over a century. Crucial to stemming the tide of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is communicating to vulnerable populations the means by which they can protect themselves. To this end, the collaborators forming the Translation Initiative for COvid-19 (TICO-19) have made test and development data available to AI and MT researchers in 35 different languages in order to foster the development of tools and resources for improving access to information about COVID-19 in these languages. In addition to 9 high-resourced, pivot languages, the team is targeting 26 lesser resourced languages, in particular languages of Africa, South Asia and South-East Asia, whose populations may be the most vulnerable to the spread of the virus. The same data is translated into all of the languages represented, meaning that testing or development can be done for any pairing of languages in the set. Further, the team is converting the test and development data into translation memories (TMXs) that can be used by localizers from and to any of the languages.
Every day, more people are becoming infected and dying from exposure to COVID-19. Some countries in Europe like Spain, France, the UK and Italy have suffered particularly badly from the virus. Others such as Germany appear to have coped extremely well. Both health professionals and the general public are keen to receive up-to-date information on the effects of the virus, as well as treatments that have proven to be effective. In cases where language is a barrier to access of pertinent information, machine translation (MT) may help people assimilate information published in different languages. Our MT systems trained on COVID-19 data are freely available for anyone to use to help translate information published in German, French, Italian, Spanish into English, as well as the reverse direction.
COVID-19 causes a global epidemic infection, which is the most severe infection disaster in human history. In the absence of particular medication and vaccines, tracing and isolating the source of infection is the best option to slow the spread of the virus and reduce infection and death rates among the population. There are three main obstacles in the process of tracing the infection: 1) Patients electronic health record is stored in a traditional centralized database that could be stolen and tampered with the infection data, 2) The confidential personal identity of the infected user may be revealed to a third party or organization, 3) Existing infection tracing systems do not trace infections from multiple dimensions. Either the system is location-based or individual-based tracing. In this work, we propose a global COVID-19 information sharing system that utilizes the Blockchain, Smart Contract, and Bluetooth technologies. The proposed system unifies location-based and Bluetooth-based contact tracing services into the Blockchain platform, where the automatically executed smart contracts are deployed so that users can get consistent and non-tamperable virus trails. The anonymous functionality provided by the Blockchain and Bluetooth technology protects the users identity privacy. With our proposed analysis formula for estimating the probability of infection, users can take measures to protect themselves in advance. We also implement a prototype system to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.
COVID-19 has resulted in a worldwide pandemic, leading to lockdown policies and social distancing. The pandemic has profoundly changed the world. Traditional methods for observing these historical events are difficult because sending reporters to areas with many infected people can put the reporters lives in danger. New technologies are needed for safely observing responses to these policies. This paper reports using thousands of network cameras deployed worldwide for the purpose of witnessing activities in response to the policies. The network cameras can continuously provide real-time visual data (image and video) without human efforts. Thus, network cameras can be utilized to observe activities without risking the lives of reporters. This paper describes a project that uses network cameras to observe responses to governments policies during the COVID-19 pandemic (March to April in 2020). The project discovers over 30,000 network cameras deployed in 110 countries. A set of computer tools are created to collect visual data from network cameras continuously during the pandemic. This paper describes the methods to discover network cameras on the Internet, the methods to collect and manage data, and preliminary results of data analysis. This project can be the foundation for observing the possible second wave in fall 2020. The data may be used for post-pandemic analysis by sociologists, public health experts, and meteorologists.