Researchers Tackle COVID-19 with AI

A pair of papers coauthored by Anima Anandkumar, Caltech's Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, were selected as finalists for the 2021 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research. The annual award provides $10,000 from Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing. Ultimately, the 2021 special award went to a team from Japan's Riken research institute that simulated how COVID-19 might spread from person to person via aerosolized droplets in a variety of real-world situations. Both of Anandkumar's papers studied the coronavirus using artificial intelligence (AI) methods, including those she developed that were integrated with large-scale numerical simulations run on supercomputers. "All the six finalists this year had some component in their calculations that used AI," Anandkumar says. "This has enabled unprecedented understanding of the coronavirus that would not have been possible with conventional tools." The research in one of Anandkumar's finalist papers, titled "#COVIDisAirborne: AI-Enabled Multiscale Computational Microscopy of Delta SARS-CoV-2 in a Respiratory Aerosol ," used an AI method to model an aerosolized particle of the virus that causes COVID-19, using the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL) Summit supercomputer. The work, led by a team of researchers from UC San Diego-and including Tom Miller, Caltech professor of chemistry; and Zhuoran Qiao, a PhD candidate-described the interactions of the COVID-19 spike protein and aerosol phase with calcium ions, which are known to play a key role in mucin aggregation in epithelial tissues.