Fighting against COVID-19: Latest Advances, Challenges and Methodologies

Dear Colleagues,

The 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic is an ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). It was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and recognized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. The outbreak of COVID-19 has rapidly spread to most countries in the world. There have been more than 351 million confirmed cases and 5.5 million deaths worldwide.

The scientific community must play a leading role to fight against COVID-19, and it is our obligation to step forward to assist in the eradication of COVID-19. For this purpose, it is important to find mechanisms, methodologies, models, techniques and/or systems capable of helping during the various stages of this pandemic: evolution, early diagnosis, prevention of spread, isolation measures, etc. Particularly, Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a vital role in fighting COVID-19. For example, AI techniques can help develop vaccines & targeted drugs for COVID-19. In epidemiology, AI can provide tracking and prediction of the spread speed of infected territories and areas to assist policymakers in making appropriate decisions. The visualization technology provides a global overview for policymakers. AI methods are efficient in making fast and accurate diagnoses of COVID-19 using trained models based on routine CT or X-ray. Wearable sensors with AI can monitor abnormality for home-based mild COVID-19 patients. AI can analyze human behavioral data to improve individual or community quarantine and social control policies. AI can help predict the protein structures of the coronavirus. AI can utilize the emotional data in the mental health of COVID-19 patients to help cope with self-quarantined people. AI can manage medical resources (e.g., face masks, ventilator, et al.) supply chain.

We are seeking contributions that report the Latest Advances, Challenges and Methodologies for Fighting against COVID-19. Investigations on mathematical models built on the pandemic prevalence and incidence are also welcome. Submissions should clarify the substantive improvements on work that has already been published, accepted for publication, or submitted in parallel to other conferences or journals.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Data-driven AI for fighting COVID-19
• Explainable AI for fighting COVID-19
• Trustworthy AI for fighting COVID-19
• Evolutionary AI for fighting COVID-19
• Deep learning for fighting COVID-19
• Multi-agent for fighting COVID-19
• Multimodal fusion for fighting COVID-19
• Feature extraction, selection, reduction, and optimization
• Prediction and forecast for fighting COVID-19
• Wearable systems to fighting against COVID-19
• Statistical studies of future trends of COVID-19
• Medical images analysis for fighting against COVID-19
• Computer-aided systems for fighting against COVID-19
• Machine learning models, methods, and theories

Prof. Dr. Zhengchao Dong
Prof. Dr. Juan Manuel Gorriz
Prof. Dr. Yudong Zhang
Topic Editors