Google Helps Scientists Working On Coronavirus Cure With Free Access To Virus Datasets

Google is now attempting to help scientists and researchers to find a cure for Coronavirus in a unique way. The tech giant is doing this by offering free datasets to researchers for building AI models. The effort comes as a part of Google¡¯s COVID-19 Public Dataset Program.

For this, Google unveiled an open repository of coronavirus-related databases on Monday, in a step towards helping scientists and medical researchers find a faster cure for COVID-19 global pandemic.

(Representative Image: Reuters)

The repository includes Global Health Data from the World Bank, datasets from Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE) as well as OpenStreetMap data.

To make access to the datasets easier, Google has marked them under the label ¡°COVID-19¡± and is allowing free access to these until September 15. This will no doubt ensure those working on a Coronavirus cure or vaccine to be able to have a better shot at making it happen sooner.

In addition to the free datasets, Google¡¯s BigQuery Machine Learning can also be used by researchers and programmers to build advanced AI models for COVID-19 research through simple SQL queries in the company¡¯s cloud-based data warehouse.

Google is not the only tech firm working on such a model, it's a growing trend among technology companies that are coming forward and opening their doors towards joining forces in the fight against COVID-19.

Many AI researchers and companies, including majors such as Baidu and Alibaba are focusing on the idea. Such companies have also open-sourced models for AI researchers to speed up the process for coronavirus-related studies.

IBM and NVIDIA, amongst Alibaba and Microsoft, have also pledged their resources towards the cause of accelerating medical efforts to find a COVID-19 cure faster than normal.