On Wednesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and National Institute of Standards and Technology stated that it had joined forces with four entities, two institutes, and two universities, to further developments in search engines that streamline COVID-19 research. The effort, which has been named “TREC-COVID,” is a collaboration between the two previously mentioned agencies, the Allen Institute for AI, the National Library of Medicine, Oregon Health and Science University and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
The collaboration will apply the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), a decades-old information retrieval tech program, to the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset. The resource was initially launched in mid-March to aid pandemic relief efforts, and now includes more than 44,000 pieces of literature and data about novel coronavirus and its virus family. The program will help to create datasets and use an assessment process that helped health-care communities through evaluating and optimizing their systems.
Read More: OSTP, NIST Team Up to Fine-Tune Search Engines for COVID-19 Research
