Abstract
The first few months of 2020 have profoundly changed the way we live our lives and carry out our daily activities. Although the widespread use of futuristic robotaxis and self-driving commercial vehicles has not yet become a reality, the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically accelerated the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in different fields. We have witnessed the equivalent of two years of digital transformation compressed into just a few months. Whether it is in tracing epidemiological peaks or in transacting contactless payments, the impact of these developments has been almost immediate, and a window has opened up on what is to come. Here we analyze and discuss how AI can support us in facing the ongoing pandemic. Despite the numerous and undeniable contributions of AI, clinical trials and human skills are still required. Even if different strategies have been developed in different states worldwide, the fight against the pandemic seems to have found everywhere a valuable ally in AI, a global and open-source tool capable of providing assistance in this health emergency. A careful AI application would enable us to operate within this complex scenario involving healthcare, society and research.
Highlights
COVID-19 may be considered the first influenza pandemic to be disseminated in our hyper-connected world
In this work we summarize the main research contributions related to the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the COVID-19 pandemic by reporting the Tables 2, 3, and 4 at the end of each subsection, in order to guide the reader through the principal literature results about application of AI in Covid-19 related contexts
The proposed overview of scientific works published during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic highlights some achievements and limitations of AI in tackling the 2020 pandemic
Summary
The COVID-19 emergency has given an incredible boost to the improvement of existing models and the development of new prototypes in order to achieve promising results in fields such as the tracing of the infection (Pinotti et al 2020) or the prediction of its diffusion and the effects of restrictive measures (Della Rossa et al 2020). Inf Syst Front recognition and segmentation, time series forecasting, sentiment analysis, system control and dynamics simulation are widely present in the literature, as well as robotic self-operating solutions that have proven to be effective in containing social contacts All these promising outcomes explain the great attention focused on worldwide research on AI as an instrument to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. AI technologies, expecting to offer efficient and low-cost models to address medical and social issues, have naturally attracted many of the more seriously affected regions Countries such as Iran, Turkey and Egypt, alongside the USA, China, India, Italy and the UK, are among the top ten states where more peer-reviewed papers related to the application of AI technologies to COVID-19 issues have been written. This article proposes a perspective from a data and applications point of view, framing the problem as a timeline, obtained by reorganizing the pandemic’s temporal phases, as provided by the WHO
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
