Atos’ AI experts take part in global challenge to study Covid-19 behavior

Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, is taking part in the ‘Covid-19 Dataset Challenge’, an international competition hosted on online community Kaggle[1] asking AI researchers to apply machine learning tools and techniques to help provide answers to key questions about the virus. Atos is deeply involved with a team of 10 experts working on the project, using their AI and automation skills to digest scientific articles and help the medical community to keep up to date with the latest publications on Covid-19.

Literature reviews are essential to the research process. They aim to compare and contrast the thinking, ideologies and concepts on a particular subject area. In the specific context of Covid-19, they are essential to the research process as they provide deeper insights, leading to quicker discovery of any gaps in research. They serve as a stepping-stone towards developing empirically grounded hypotheses but are very time-consuming.

For several weeks, Atos experts have been focusing on processing thousands of articles.  These are part of an overall dataset of machine-readable coronavirus literature for data and text mining. It includes over 47,000 articles was released by researchers from several organizations at the request of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The Atos team is currently focusing on the topic of extracting and classifying opinions to quickly get reliable information. Atos hopes its contribution will help scientists get a better understanding of the virus faster and will lead to quicker treatment discovery.

“With machine learning techniques like natural language processing, we get relevant data into the right hands more quickly. We need to come together as companies, scientists and government, and work to automate all tasks that can be automated – so that we make sure the Covid-19 researchers are spending a maximum of time on innovation.” says Kaoutar Sghiouer, Chief Data Science at Atos, who put together the Atos team for this Challenge.“The Atos team is composed of 10 experts from different countries, who comes from either R&D or Operations. We are all fully committed to giving the best of ourselves to help the community.”

The Atos team uses its internal computing and storage capacity and also benefits from free credit from its partner Google Cloud.

Submissions to the ‘Covid-19 Dataset Challenge’ will be evaluated in 2 rounds, ending respectively on April 16 and June 16, 2020