The world needs good quality information; arguably now more than ever. The global challenges faced, like the COVID-19 pandemic, together with the depressing levels of polarisation seen across nations increasingly antagonised by their elected officials, deserve every effort we can make to advance in that direction.
Take the Spanish Government, for example, which has enacted a wide range of new laws and economic subsidies to ameliorate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. Leveraging the team’s expertise, knowledge and reputation in communicating public policies in a rigorous but approachable manner, Civio has already produced 41 openly-licensed detailed explainers and 18 sharable summary cards. This top quality resources have attracted > 650,000 visitors in the last month. In addition to this, and through its online advisory service, the foundation has already solved more hundreds of personal queries related to unemployment, work safety, subsidies or mobility restrictions, channeling them through the appropriate governmental press conferences when needed, and always sharing the responses publicly. An exemplary effort, in my view!
At Iris.ai, on another hand, we are trying to help researchers deploy the right scientific literature with the free use of our products. For formal academics or citizen scientists working on any aspect of research around COVID-19, whether the epidemiology, virology, biology, psychology or any other front, a premium account has been made available for free. Our only requirement is that the work carried out with the Iris.ai tools on the current pandemic be shared publicly. We believe our tools can help those researchers find the right resources to tackle the problem faced, sifting through an open dataset of almost 30,000 articles related to COVID-19, put together by the Allen Institute / Semantic Scholar. This, plus about 120 million other research papers (Open Access), are all connected to the Iris.ai tools. Here, for example, is an interesting map on “The epidemiology and pathogenesis of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak”.
I paste below a link to an interview I did recently, exploring our Iris.ai work more broadly around AI and science.
