Volume Twenty-one
Issue # 420 (April 1, 2020)
- Introduction
- News From the IPL
- 2019-2020 IPL SPEAKER SERIES
- Editor’s Pick
- Cities, Clusters & Regions
- Innovation Policy
- Statistics & Indicators
- Policy Digest
- Events
Introduction
This newsletter is published by The Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
News From the IPL
Steven Denney – Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto
Viet Vu – Economist at the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship
This brief analyzes the perspectives of 42 executives at Canadian technology scale-up companies in an effort to inform public discourse and government policymaking on how best to support Canadian scale-ups during the COVID-19 crisis. Data was collected between March 27-30, 2020. Respondents were asked to identify their top business concern and then evaluate federal support being offered to businesses under the Economic Response Plan. Following these questions, respondents were provided with two open-ended questions. The first question asked respondents to provide their thoughts on the government’s response. The second open-ended question asked respondents what more they thought should be done to help their firm. The research finds ‘revenue’ is the number one priority, among respondent firms. On program evaluation, the research finds that “policies that support short term cost for businesses, including improved cash flow and ensuring staff payroll, are positively received… [but] technology scale-ups are thinking long-term: while they are concerned about costs, they are more concerned about having a secure revenue stream post-crisis.” Notably, when provided open-ended questions, support for procurement, as a demand-side measure, is salient.
2019-2020 IPL SPEAKER SERIES
ALL IPL SEMINARS HAVE BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO THE CLOSURE OF THE UNIVERSITY. WE WILL AIM TO RESCHEDULE THESE FOR A FUTURE TIME.
Towards an Integrated Place-based Innovation Policy
Elvira Uyarra, Reader, Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester
CANCELLED
Room 108N, 1 Devonshire Place, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy
What Next For UK Science and Innovation Policy?
Kieron Flanagan, Senior Lecturer, Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester
CANCELLED
Room 108N, 1 Devonshire Place, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy
Editor’s Pick
Mapping the Landscape of Artificial Intelligence Applications Against COVID-19
Joseph Bullock, Alexandra (Sasha) Luccioni, Katherine Hoffmann Pham, Cynthia Sin Nga Lam, Miguel Luengo-Oroz
This white paper, co-authored by Alexandra (Sasha) Luccioni from Mila Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, presents an overview of recent studies using Machine Learning and, more broadly, Artificial Intelligence, to tackle many aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. The paper details research efforts at different scales including molecular, medical and epidemiological applications. The paper finishes with a discussion of promising future directions of research and the tools and resources needed to facilitate AI research.
Cities, Clusters & Regions
The Robots Are Ready as the COVID-19 Recession Spreads
Rust Belt manufacturing regions are found to be particularly vulnerable.
Canadian Urban Institute
CityShare Canada is a crowdsourced platform that aggregates examples of community-based resilience in action, and that accelerates collective problem-solving to help local communities across Canada respond to COVID-19. Users are asked to share examples of how Canadian communities are responding to the crisis with creativity and imagination. The website notes that “collective problem-solving and collaboration will be instrumental in how Canada mitigates the local impacts of COVID-19 and creates on-the-ground solutions.”
Pandemics, Cities, Regions & Industry
Regional Studies
The Regional Studies Association has created this resource in an effort to continue “supporting the global community in researching and disseminating evidence about how regions, cities and industry are dealing with the impact of the Coronavirus, including ongoing research, publications and research ideas about regional responses to the current crises.”
Innovation Policy
Canada’s Plan to Mobilize Science to Fight COVID-19
Justin Trudeau, Prime Minster of Canada
This recent news release from Prime Minister Trudeau announced support to “quickly mobilize Canadian researchers and life sciences companies to support large-scale efforts towards countermeasures to combat COVID-19, including potential vaccines and treatments.” The $275 million funding for coronavirus research and medical countermeasures is part of the Government of Canada’s more than $1 billion COVID-19 Response Fund. The funding will be used to “advance projects that are already underway by university researchers and others to respond to COVID-19, and ensure domestic supply of potential vaccines.”
Ontario Together: Help Fight Coronavirus
Ontario Government
This page from the Ontario government “welcome[s] help from businesses and organizations who can supply emergency products and innovative solutions to support our response to Covid-19.” The post calls for the following innovative solutions under the heading “we need your innovation”:
- virtual mental health services for people who are vulnerable or living in remote communities
- supply chain resiliency monitoring
- financial planning and advising for small businesses that can be delivered online at low-cost including advice about relief programs and how to apply
International Roundtable on AI and COVID-19 – Meeting Summary
CIFAR
This post summarizes the proceedings of CIFAR’s March 23rd International Roundtable on AI and COVID-19. Alan Bernstein ( President and CEO of CIFAR) opened the meeting by articulating its key goal: to discuss challenges in slowing and stopping the COVID-19 pandemic, and identifying where AI can play a role in addressing some of the most pressing questions. Peter Singer reiterated the World Health Organization’s message about the need for rapid testing and contact tracing, in addition to physical distancing, in containing this pandemic. Samira Asma pointed out the significant gaps in the current reported data, for example, in terms of sex and age desegregation. Mona Nemer emphasized the importance of articulating what kind of data is needed, the accessibility of this data for researchers, and the need for ideas and approaches on how to exit from this crisis. Themes were summarized as follows: Biology, Drug and Vaccine Development; Clinical Trials Design; Health System Capacity and Resilience; and Policy Implications.
Statistics & Indicators
OECD.AI Policy Observatory
This AI-powered online resource provides the latest COVID-19 developments by country, in real time. Data visualizations illustrate cross-country comparisons of the growth in the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths. There are also media sources sortable by country. There is also a simulator to interactively explore the effects of social distancing on the spread of any contagious disease.
Policy Digest
Vector Institute COVID-19 Research, Research Tools & List of Funding Sources
The Vector Institute
The Vector Institute is compiling a list of resources to facilitate collective research efforts to harness artificial intelligence in the fight against COVID-19. The following lists include information on Vector Institute research initiatives, other funding sources and research tools:
“Vector COVID-19 research
Where appropriate data is available, Vector researchers are contributing to a number initiatives to fight COVID-19. Vector has also issued a call to its industry sponsors in an effort to create an inventory of talent such as data scientists or engineers that may be available to contribute to related research.
- FLATTEN is a website that enables individuals to self-report symptoms, view an infection heatmap, and identify regions that have a high density of immunosuppressed and elderly individuals with a goal of helping the government to “flatten the curve” of COVID-19 spread. Vector Chief Scientific Advisor Geoffrey Hinton and Vector Faculty Member Marzyeh Ghassemi were advisers on the project.
- Developed by Vector students Duncan Forster and John Giorgi and their advisor Vector Faculty Member Bo Wang, CiteNet.io, is a scientific paper search and visualization tool that indexes the pre-print servers bioRxiv and medRxiv by paper title using NLP. It is updated daily.
- Screening and risk stratification of COVID patients with CT and/or X-Ray data – Working with Joseph Paul Cohen at MILA, Vector Faculty Member Marzyeh Ghassemi is co-leading this project which aims to develop a chest X-ray image classifier for diagnosing COVID-19 from patient chest X-ray images using deep neural networks. This could help as a side tool for resource allocation.
- AI-driven development of small molecule therapeutics for SARS-CoV-2 – Vector Faculty Member Alan Aspuru-Guzik is leading a project to identify repurposed and small-molecule novel therapeutic candidates to target SARS-COV-2.
- Scaling up therapeutic molecules, new soaps and coatings, and inhibitors for its reproduction machinery – Aspuru-Guzik is also leading a project to use active learning models to find the most effective surfactants and surface coatings for reducing viral lifetimes. The goal is to reduce their lifetimes to under one hour.
- CryoSPARC, developed by Vector Faculty Member David Fleet and some of his students, was used by US researchers to create the first 3D atomic scale map of the part of the virus that attaches to and infects human cells.
- Vector Faculty Member Bo Wang and local drug discovery company Cyclica, are using the company’s MatchMaker technology for AI-enabled drug repurposing for COVID-19, in hopes of uncovering non-obvious relationships between all existing drugs and antiviral activity.
COVID-19 Research Tools
The global scientific community is working diligently to tackle the most immediate scientific questions related to COVID-19. Within this effort is a role for the world’s AI experts, including the extended Vector research community, to help find answers to some of the most vexing problems related to the virus. Below is an incomplete list of funding, open-source research and data sets, and other digital tools to help researchers in their work. ***This list will be updated. If you have relevant links please send to media@vectorinstitute.ai along with a short explanation of the work.
- The government of Canada will invest $275 million in additional funding to enhance research capacity on vaccine and antiviral development and clinical trials, including in Canada. This is on top of the $27 million in already announced funding.
- The White House issued a call to action to the tech community to develop techniques that can answer scientific questions related to COVID-19. Along with a coalition of leading research groups, it has released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), a resource of over 29,000 scholarly articles, including over 13,000 with full text, about COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and related coronaviruses. This freely available dataset is provided to the global research community to apply recent advances in natural language processing and other AI techniques to generate new insights in support of the ongoing fight against this infectious disease.
- Staff at Element AI have developed a Corona calculator, a tool that helps to visualize the impact of social distancing
- DeepMind has released structure predictions of several under-studied proteins associated with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 created with their AlphaFold system. The predictions have not been experimentally verified, but may contribute to the understanding of how the virus functions.
- In their response to COVID, researchers in Taiwan combined health insurance data with immigration/customs data as a foundation and then layered travel/medical history to define and triage individual risk.
- WangLabs have developed CiteNet.io, a scientific paper search and visualization tool that indexes the pre-print servers bioRxiv and medRxiv by paper title using NLP. It is updated daily.
- Novel Corona Virus 2019 Dataset – day level information on COVID-19 affected cases
- An open database of COVID-19 cases with chest X-ray or CT images.
- Public Health Ontario has uploaded genomic data for the virus to NextStrain, which offers real-time tracking of pathogen evolution.
- A small drug repurposing study.
- A map of COVID-19 cases in Canada put together by students from the Dalla-Lana School of Public Health.
- GISAID: Global viral genome sequences and epidemiological data.
- Coronavirus Tech Handbook was put together by a group of physicians and techies around the globe in order to populate a centralized open resource.
- “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” from Nature Medicine.
- FLATTEN is a website that enables individuals to self-report symptoms, view an infection heatmap, and identify regions that have a high density of immunosuppressed and elderly individuals with a goal of helping the government to “flatten the curve” of COVID-19 spread.
- #Howismyflattening is a group of physicians, medical students, computational health researchers, designers, and epidemiologists rapidly filtering and presenting emergent COVID-19 data to help Ontarians #FlattenTheCurve. They connect experts and present data in an easy-to-digest, actionable way to help Ontarians and Public Health Leaders act decisively as evidence grows and time ticks by.
- The NRC’s COVID-19 Challenge Program brings together a national network of researchers and scientific facilities to address pressing needs and challenges. Composed of teams of government, academic, and private-sector partners it will address a range of medium-term Public Health Agency of Canada and Health Canada needs.
- Covid-19 genomic information being uploaded to GISAID.
- The British Society of Thoracic Imaging (BSTI) have built a free to use, anonymised and encrypted online portal to upload and refer imaging of patients with either confirmed or suspected COVID-19.
- Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance – What the next 18 months can look like, if leaders buy us time.
- InFact’s Coordinated global research response.
- “The effect of travel restrictions on the spread of the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak” from Science.
- COVID-Net is a convolutional neural network for COVID-19 detection via chest radiography created by DarwinAI’s research team, in conjunction with the University of Waterloo. DarwinAI is open sourcing it to the research community and giving academics access to their explainability platform so they can contribute to the project.
- Kaggle COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge.
- CIFAR is issuing a targeted call for AI and COVID-19 interdisciplinary research collaborations to spark innovative, high-risk/high-reward ideas and projects. CIFAR’s Catalyst Program provides seed funding (up to $15,000 CAD) for time-limited activities. The deadline for applications is April 3, 2020 11:59 EDT.
- “Mapping the landscape of artificial intelligence applications against COVID-19,” a white paper, co-authored by Sasha Luccioni from MILA.
- U of T is launching an action fund to support research that will make near-term contributions to the fight against COVID-19. The university has already invested $5 million and is aiming to match that amount with a call for donations. They have issued a call to faculty for research proposals by March 30.
- The White House announced the launch of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium to provide COVID-19 researchers worldwide with access to the world’s most powerful high performance computing resources that can significantly advance the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus.
- A call-to-action from Myant to work together to enable remote screening and a connected care solution to COVID-19 for vulnerable populations.
- #Hackthecurve is a new challenge from the DMZ at Ryerson. Over a two-week period, teams of up to five participants will compete for $10,000 in cash prizes by seeing who can develop an innovative technology solution to help flatten the pandemic’s curve.
- Element AI has released a beta of a free search platform to help workers find answers and patterns in research papers by locating relevant work across thousands of published papers.
- COVID-19 Archive is a collection of selected COVID-19 related news articles, categorized by date.
- AI Against COVID-19 Canada is a special task force, led by researchers from CIFAR, Mila – Quebec Artificial Research Institute, the Vector Institute ,and Amii, aiming to map and coordinate AI projects in Canada that can help solve the COVID-19 outbreak and limit its impact on society.”
Events
The Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research
THIS CONFERENCE HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT COVID-19 AND RECENT TRAVEL ADVISORIES. IT WILL BE RESCHEDULED FOR A FUTURE DATE
Munich, Germany, 23–24 April, 2020
The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, the Technical University of Munich and BRICK-Collegio Carlo Alberto are organising the annual workshop “The Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research” at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Submissions are accepted until 15 January 2020, with particular focus on: Evaluation of science policy; Role of gender and family in scientific research; Organising research activities in universities, PROs and private R&D labs, Spillovers from scientific research, Collaboration and research networks, Scientific careers and mobility, and the Role of ethics, trust and replicability in science.
Policies, Processes and Practices for Performance of Innovation Ecosystems (P4IE)
THIS CONFERENCE HAS BEEN CANCELLED AS OF MARCH 13, 2020 DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT COVID-19 AND RECENT TRAVEL ADVISORIES. IT WILL BE RESCHEDULED FOR A FUTURE DATE.
Ottawa, Ontario, 12-13 May 2020
The Partnership For the Organization of Innovation and New Technologies is organizing the first ever ‘‘Policies, Processes and Practices for Performance of Innovation Ecosystems” (P4IE) international conference on 12-13 May 2020 in Ottawa. Organized around eight highly relevant tracks, the conference offers participants the opportunity to discuss the impact of various technologies, practices, processes and policies, on innovation ecosystems, and the best means by which to design collaborative environments. The goal of the conference is to explore ways to strengthen Canada’s innovation through innovation ecosystems.
THIS CONFERENCE HAS BEEN CANCELLED AS OF MARCH 13, 2020 DUE TO THE STATE OF EMERGENCY IN SPAIN.
Valencia, Spain, 14-15 May, 2020
The Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Valencia, in collaboration with the University of Padova and the University of Firenze, organize the 3rd International Workshop on Cluster Research. As in the past editions, the event aims to to bring together some of the world’s leading scholars working on clusters, networks, ecosystems, platforms and regions. The conference gathers scholars from economic geography, innovation studies, regional science, as well as those working on economics and management, sociology or network theory.
DRUID20 Silver Anniversary Conference
Copenhagen, Denmark, 15-17 June, 2020
THIS CONFERENCE HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT COVID-19 AND RECENT TRAVEL ADVISORIES.
DRUID celebrates 25 years as one of the world’s premier academic conferences on innovation and the dynamics of structural, institutional and geographic change. DRUID is proud to invite senior and junior scholars to participate and contribute with a paper to the DRUID20 SILVER ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE, hosted by Copenhagen Business School. Presenting distinguished plenary speakers, a range of parallel paper sessions, and an attractive social program that celebrates DRUID’s 25 years, the conference aims at mapping theoretical, empirical and methodological advances, contributing novel insights, and help identifying scholarly positions, divisions, and common grounds in current scientific controversies within the field.
Canadian Science Policy Conference
Ottawa, Canada, 23-25 November, 2020
The CSPC 2020 call for panel proposals is now open. The 12th Canadian Science Policy Conference (CSPC 2020), will be held in Gatineau Quebec on November 23-25, 2020 at Hilton Lac-Leamy. Presenters are invited to submit proposals in a variety of presentation formats that revolve around any of the conference themes. Due to the unprecedented impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals and organizations across Canada and the world, and to accommodate the community, CSPC is extending the panel proposal deadline by an additional four weeks, to May 15th, 2020.
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This newsletter is prepared by Travis Southin.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe