Artificial intelligence in the fight against corona: current and future researches

Artificial intelligence has been applied widely in our daily lives in different ways with numerous successful stories. Artificial intelligence also contributed in dealing with the corona virus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, which spreaded out around the globe. This article presents a survey of artificial intelligence methods being used in the fight against the COVID-19 outbreak and outlines the crucial roles of artificial intelligence research in this unprecedented battle. This article reports several areas where artificial intelligence plays as an essential component, from medical image processing, data analysis, text mining and natural language processing, to computational biology and medicine. A summary of COVID19 related data sources that are available for research purposes is also presented. We highlight groups of problems related to the COVID-19 pandemic and point out promising artificial intelligence methods and tools that can be used to solve those problems. It is envisaged that this study will provide artificial intelligence researchers and the wider community with an overview of the current status of artificial intelligence applications and motivate researchers in harnessing artificial intelligence potentials in the fight against COVID-19. (author)