Artificial Intelligence for Fighting the COVID-19 Pandemic

With the advent of coronavirus (COVID-19), the pandemic which has created massive chaos around the world, millions of people have been affected and almost a million dead. Numerous studies have been put forth to control and devise a new medicine for the ongoing COVID-19. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been widely applied to perform various tasks in our daily life and has emerged as the most successful player in the recent times. AI has also been used to deal with the pandemic situation, and various studies have been presented to analyse and estimate the possible impact of COVID-19 using AI-based techniques. AI-based models, such as neural networks, can be used for detecting viruses with high sensitivity and speed. Also, forecasting models, such as long short-term memory (LSTM) and autoregressive moving average (ARIMA), as another aspect of AI has played a significant role in combating the COVID-19 pandemic. Also transfer learning-based techniques can be used to analyse the possible impact of COVID-19. In this chapter, we will be dealing with the unprecedented role of AI for combating the battle against COVID-19 pandemic. Here a number of different areas have been explored where AI plays a significant role and in an essential component. These include medical imaging, deep learning, natural language processing, computational biology, Internet of things, data analytics, time series analysis and others. A detailed case study on the already proposed literature is also presented. Apart from that, research directions based on the potential impact of AI and possible measures required to enhance its capabilities for the current scenario have been discussed. It is expected that this study will highlight some background to the AI research community and also to the other wider research areas about the contribution of AI in combating COVID-19 and hence provide prospective aspects in harnessing AI against the global pandemic.