DoD Uses CARES Act Funds to Leverage AI for COVID-19 Vaccines
The Department of Defense is aiming to use its existing artificial intelligence technology to screen and test COVID-19 vaccines.
Source: Thinkstock
By Jessica Kent
- The Department of Defense (DoD) is seeking to use money provided by Congress under the CARES Act to leverage artificial intelligence technology for COVID-19 vaccines.
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The department recently submitted a spending plan outlining its goal of adapting its existing AI tools to “rapidly screen, prioritize, and test Food and Drug Administration approved therapeutics for new COVID-19 drug candidates, and human test trials for vaccines and antibody based treatments.”
The money for artificial intelligence will be shifted from $3.8 billion approved for the Defense Health Program under the CARES Act to prepare for, prevent, and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. The funds would go into the Pentagon’s research and development accounts.
“DoD continues to rapidly adapt its response to the COVID-19 pandemic to protect the force and ensure the continuation of DoD missions,” the report stated. “Without this funding, such rapid AI-enabled screening capabilities cannot be established in time to respond to the current crisis.”
This builds on DoD’s previous efforts to control COVID-19 using artificial intelligence. In April, the department announced that it would utilize AI, machine learning, and data visualization tools to look for patterns or identify potential hotspots during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Department has formed a team at the Pentagon as well as a crisis management team at the Joint Staff’s facility in Suffolk, Virginia. This team receives the same information and conclusions as the Pentagon team, and it can step in for the Pentagon team if necessary.
“We have a favorable position and relative advantage. One of our competitive advantages against any threat is the quality of the force we have, and educating them with the complexity of the environment that they're in,” Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Daniel O’Donohue said at the time.
“Education is a key component of our strategic competitive advantage. Expediency [in response to COVID] got us out of the classroom. I think many of the things we've learned will be retained and take us where we need to go for the future fight.”
The US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) also recently partnered to support the development of a search engine that will enhance COVID-19 research.
For the project, NIST will initially work with the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the National Library of Medicine (NLM), Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).
The group will apply the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), a long-running program of expert engagement and technology assessment, to the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). CORD-19 is an extensive machine-readable coronavirus literature collection available for data mining.
“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.”
