NIST and OSTP Launch Effort to Improve Search Engines for COVID-19 Research

GAITHERSBURG, Md. — Today, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched a joint effort to support the development of search engines for research that will help in the fight against COVID-19. The project was developed in response to the March 16 White House Call to Action to the Tech Community on New Machine Readable COVID-19 Dataset.

“Our nation’s scientific enterprise is mobilized to defeat the invisible enemy that is COVID-19,” said Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. “Our scientists — and the businesses and institutions that provide them with advanced digital research technologies — are to be commended for their unwavering dedication to finding a cure for this insidious disease.”

“AI experts worldwide are responding to the White House’s call to action, developing approaches that help scientists gain insights from thousands of articles of COVID-19 scholarly literature,” said Michael Kratsios, U.S. chief technology officer. “The TREC-COVID program expands upon these efforts by creating powerful and accurate search engines that extract knowledge from this literature, tailored to the needs of the health-care and medical research communities. We thank NIST for this valuable contribution as part of the Trump administration’s whole-of-America response to the coronavirus.”

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