Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on science and technology
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected innumerable scientific and technical institutions globally, resulting in lower productivity in a number of fields and programs. However, the impact of the pandemic has also led to the opening of several new research funding lines for government agencies around the world.[1][2][3]
In March 2020, the United States Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, NASA, industry, and nine universities pooled resources to access supercomputers from IBM combined with cloud computing resources from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google for drug discovery.[37][38]
The COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium also aims to predict the spread of disease, model possible vaccines, and study thousands of chemical compounds to develop a COVID-19 vaccine or therapy.[37][38] As of May 2020, the Consortium has used up 437 petaFLOPS of computing power.
The C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, another consortium of Microsoft, six universities (including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a member of the first consortium), and the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Illinois, operating under the auspices of C3.ai, founded by Thomas Siebel, is pooling supercomputing resources for drug discovery, developing medical protocols, and improving public health strategies, and awarded large grants through May 2020 to researchers proposing to use AI for similar tasks.[39][40]
In March 2020, the Folding@home distributed computing project launched a program to support medical researchers around the world. The first wave of the project will simulate potential target proteins of SARS-CoV-2 and the related SARS-CoV virus, which has already been studied.[41][42][43][44]
In March, the Rosetta@home distributed computing project also joined the effort. The project uses volunteers' computers to model the proteins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to discover potential drug targets or develop new proteins to neutralize the virus. The researchers announced that using Rosetta@home, they were able to "accurately predict the atomic-scale structure of an important coronavirus protein weeks before it could be measured in the lab."[45]
In May 2020, the Open Pandemics—COVID-19 partnership was launched between Scripps Research and IBM's World Community Grid. The partnership is a distributed computing project that "will automatically run a simulated experiment in the background [of connected home PCs] that will help predict the efficacy of a particular chemical compound as a potential treatment for COVID-19."[46]
Resources for informatics and scientific crowdsourcing projects on COVID-19 can be found on the internet or as apps.[47][48][49] Some examples of such projects are listed below:
The scientific community has held several machine learning competitions to identify false information related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some examples are listed below: