How has AI contributed to dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic?

The calendar reads May, 2021. Although there is still uncertainty, many area already vaccinated against COVID-19 and hope lies on the horizon. The past year has been an annus horribilis in many ways. However, the past year has also been a year of astonishing scientific accomplishments. Numerous research groups, in combination with industry and government, have reoriented their resources to help contribute in the quest to contain the pandemic. The daily number of articles uploaded to arXiv that mention COVID-19 and their cumulative sum is shown below. It gives an idea of how people around the world, including the AI community, contributed to tackling the pandemic...

This piece reviews where these efforts have been realized as practical solutions, i.e. being used by corporations, governments, or individuals. Practical in this case refers to being used in the field, be it on an individual or collective level. “Experimental results” are largely discarded.

Five general categories are used to distinguish the different contributions. Note that the boundaries are not always that well defined and assigned categories may not fit every contribution equally well.

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