On June 1, the United Nations' World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was held in Geneva, Switzerland. The project "COVID-19 Knowledge and Data Hub", headed by Prof. Gong Ke, former President of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations and Chair of the Academic Committee of Nankai University, was awarded the Champion of WSIS Prizes 2021 in Category 7 ICT Application: e-Science.

The certificate of project "COVID-19 Knowledge and Data Hub"

Right after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the "novel coronavirus pneumonia outbreak" as a public health emergency of international concern in January 2020, two committees under the Chinese Association for Science and Technology (CAST), CCIT and CCLH co-initiated the emergency project "COVID-19 Knowledge and Data Hub". Headed by Prof. Gong Ke, the project team is formed in conjunction with teams from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR) of CAS, Nankai University, Tsinghua University, Nanjing University, and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of CAS, etc. With the help of digital technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence, the project team has called on over 170 sci-tech journals to play their parts to the WHO database for COVID-19 papers in English and Chinese. The Hub contains over 430,000 accessible papers, making itself one of the most extensive knowledge hubs for academic research concerning COVID-19 in the world, and enabling the communication of academic outcomes from Chinese responsive sci-tech efforts for research on COVID-19 control to other parts of the world.

To develop the "COVID-19 Knowledge and Data Hub", Prof. Yuan Xiaojie's team from the College of Computer Science, Nankai University has undertaken the development of the "COVID-19 Literature Intelligent Analysis Platform", which uses AI technology for speedy analysis of COVID-19 literature; Prof. Li Yuelin's team from the Business School of Nankai University has made suggestions for the optimization of the database architecture and information classification; The Office of International Affairs and the College of Foreign Languages of Nankai University have jointly conducted a project which translated 200,000 words of COVID-19 papers, and completed the translation of 9 issues of "Briefing of Chinese Sci-Tech Efforts for COVID-19 Control". All these represent NKU's contribution to the international community.

(Edited and translated by Nankai News Team)