Google donates $8.5M to 31 organizations for COVID-19 AI, data analytics efforts

Google committed more than $8.5 million to 31 organizations to further artificial intelligence and data analytics efforts focused on understanding the spread of COVID-19 as well as the impact on healthcare workers and vulnerable communities.

A Sept. 10 Google blog post said the funding is part of Google.org's $100 million commitment toward COVID-19 solutions, originally announced in May. The funds will go toward organizations for monitoring and forecasting the disease, improving health equity and minimizing secondary effects, slowing transmission and supporting healthcare workers.

Here are the 31 organizations that received funding:

1. Carnegie Mellon University for interactive maps that display real time COVID-19 data

2. Keio University to investigate reliability of large-scale surveys to model COVID-19 spread

3. University College London for modeling COVID-19 prevalence

4. Boston Children's Hospital, Oxford University, Northwestern University for building a public health data platform

5. Tel Aviv University to develop simulation models with synthetic data to investigate COVID-19 spread in Israel

6. Kampala International University, Stanford University, Leiden University, GO FAIR for data sharing standards implementation among African institutions

7. Morehouse School of Medicine Satcher Health Leadership Institute to develop an interactive COVID-19 health equity tracker in the U.S.

8. Florida A&M University and Shaw University to examine social determinants of health and impact of COVID-19 on communities of color in Florida and North Carolina

9. Boston University School of Public Health to examine drivers of racial, ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in COVID-19 causes and outcomes

10. University of North Carolina and Vanderbilt University to investigate susceptibility to the virus and outcomes variability among Hispanic or Latinx populations

11. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to measure the impact of the virus on non-COVID-19 healthcare, including delayed care

12. Georgia Institute of Technology to investigate spreading information to vulnerable populations

13. Cornell Tech to develop digital tools and resources on partner violence during the pandemic

14. University of Michigan School of Information to evaluate the effect of rapid virtualization of primary care on health equity

15. Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar to model how air pollution could affect COVID-19 survivors

16. Cornell University, EURECOM to develop scalable methods to identify misinformation and verify claims about COVID-19

17. Arizona State University to apply analytics and contact tracing on campus

18. Stanford University to detect emerging hotspots

19. University of Virginia, Princeton University, University of Maryland for digital contact tracing

20. University of Washington to examine the environmental SARS-CoV-2 detection and filtration methods on buses and in public spaces

21. Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru to mitigate COVID-19 spread on India's transit system

22. TU Berlin, University of Luxembourg to better understand the binding of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human cells

23. Medic Mobile and Dimagi to develop data analytics tools for frontline health workers in places like India and Kenya

24. Global Strategies to develop software that supports healthcare workers adopting COVID-19 protocols in underserved and rural areas

25. C Minds to create an open source support system for COVID-19 clinical trials

26. Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein to integrate community health workers and volunteers for mental health services in a Brazilian vulnerable community

27. Fiocruz Bahia and Federal University of Bahia to establish an AI platform for research and information sharing in Brazil

28. RAD-AID to develop a data lake for institutions in low and middle income countries

29. Yonsei University College of Medicine to scale and distribute systems to predict hospitalization and ICU needs during the pandemic

30. University of California Berkeley and Gladstone institutes to create a rapid at-home CRISPR-based COVID-19 diagnostic test with cell phone technology

31. Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Technologia for open-source access to anonymized COVID-19 chest X-ray and clinical data