THE INSTITUTE In the race to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, health care providers and scientists must sift through a growing mountain of research, both new and old. But they face several obstacles. The sheer volume of material makes using traditional search engines difficult because simple keyword searches aren't sufficient to extract meaning from the published research. This is further complicated by the fact that most search engines present research results in visual file formats like pdfs and bitmaps, which are unreadable to typical web browsers.

IEEE Member Peter Staar, a researcher at IBM Research Europe, in Zurich, and manager of the Scalable Knowledge Ingestion group, has built a platform called Deep Search that could help speed along the process. The cloud-based platform combs through literature, reads and labels each data point, table, image, and paragraph, and translates scientific content into a uniform, searchable structure.