COVID19 Research# What is COVID-19 Ask Miso Anything?
COVID19 Ask Miso Anything is a platform we’ve built to help healthcare professionals, research scientists, public health officials in the scientific arms race against COVID-19. Quite simply, you ask questions, you get answers. Not documents you have to sift through. Answers sourced from the ground truth of 55,361 peer-review and pre-print research papers and guidelines and commentary from the CDC, WHO and leading health experts from around the world. We’re using the latest advancements in Natural Language Understanding to help get you directly to the answers you’re looking for and literally highlight the current scientific debate around the topic you’re interested in.
# What is Miso? Who built this?
Miso is a startup based in the Bay Area, Taipei and Omaha building a search and recommendation platform that can intuitively and quickly understand a user’s interests and context and get them the right information at the right time. Our team is founded by two of Deborah Estrin’s former students at CornellTech’s small data lab, and we count amongst us RecSys veterans from Alibaba, Yahoo and Microsoft. We may even be winning an international competition in our field at this moment. Feel free to drop us a line anytime at hello@askmiso.com. And yes, our homepage could use some work.
# Why did you build this?
Our founders spent their 20s working on global health, specifically on community health worker systems for HIV/AIDS and the hunt for infectious diseases much like COVID-19. We’ve gotten to know the researchers on the front lines of the fight for better global health equity and security, and we know they work long hours, for little to no pay, and they do it to protect our lives. And many of us have siblings and close friends who are physicians, nurses and public health officers, who wake up every morning and risk their lives with limited resources to care for COVID-19 patients in hospitals and clinics around the world. We built this site for them and we hope this makes a small difference in their daily work against this virus.
# What research and content is powering this?
We built our research index from the ground up, first using the WHO and NIH’s COVID-19 research databases, and then have an automated system curating an even larger and larger research database directly from well-known journal publishers and volunteer help from virology and public health friends. We currently have 7,333 papers in our index. The bulk of our index is from preprint repositories like bioRxiv, medRxiv and SSRN, along with peer-review papers from the major journals who signed on to the Wellcome commitment for COVID-19 research to be free and accessible for the long-term.
# Why does your database seem smaller than other COVID-19 databases (for example, the one from Ai2)?
We’ve learned by trial and errors building these types of services, that content-product-user fit really matters. So we curated the database for COVID-19 Ask Miso Anything with a balanced focus on precision AND recall: We narrowed our scope on primarily SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 literature, and supplemented it with literature on coronaviruses that have had zoonotic spillover in the past, like SARS and MERS. Other databases like the CORD-19 one are fantastic comprehensive resources to encompass the full spectrum of One Health research the last few decades as it relates to COVID-19. But they are also noisier in that regard because they include content about other virus families that aren’t directly related to SARS-CoV-2 and the epidemiological context of our current pandemic. We’re looking into how we might integrate the CORD-19 corpus and still perform at our current level, but this is still lab level research for our ML team.
# What’s the difference between a preprint and peer-reviewed research?
Preprints are a way for researchers to share their work as essentially a draft paper, but one that hasn’t gone through formal peer review and publication in a peer-review scholarly or scientific journal. Peer-reviewed research has usually been reviewed and vetted by a small group of academic peer reviewers for its methodology, data, analysis and conclusions. It’s worth noting though that many leading research labs around the world are defaulting to preprints first, because they actually help support and coordinate faster evidence-based research and response to outbreaks, as we’ve seen with Ebola and Zika in the past. Rapidly evolving healthcare emergencies need quick dissemination of research.
# Why do I see answers from journal blog posts and news?
We wanted to make sure we had commentary from scientific journals like Nature and Science, because they go through the trouble of hiring scientifically literate writers, investigative journalists and fact checkers to really dig into the debates around fast moving public health emergencies like COVID-19.
# Why include FAQs and guidelines from the CDC and the WHO?
Even though COVID-19 Ask Miso Anything is really intended for research scientists, healthcare professionals and public health officers, we’d be irresponsible not to assume and plan for the general public to try and use this service to ask the questions they have on their mind. So whenever possible we’ve tried to include content from the CDC, WHO and leading health experts and researchers around the world. That all said, this website is not intended for direct diagnostic use or medical decision-making without review and oversight by a clinical professional. No one should change their health behavior solely on the basis of information produced on this website. And Miso does not independently verify the validity or utility of the information produced by this tool. If you have questions about the information produced on this website, please see a health care professional and consult with the CDC and WHO resources. And please remember: in a pandemic, misinformation can be deceptive and even deadly.
# Hmm, sometimes I will write a question and the answers might be off. Why is that?
We’ve definitely come a long way in natural language understanding but there are still some hard limits. Sometimes a question may contain an ambiguous term like “delivery.” This could refer to the Amazon box that’s sitting on your stoop, or to being 7-months pregnant. So a query like “Are delivery packages safe?” might generate answers for both. Adding more context to your questions in general will help a lot for now. We’re already working on some new updates but just didn’t want to delay the launch of this service. If you really hit a wall don’t hesitate to write to us at covid19@askmiso.com. We’ll be sure to reply.
# Hmm, sometimes the highlights are off. Why is that?
Sheepishly, we have to admit we decided to just launch the service ASAP versus perfecting the highlighting beforehand. It was just a tradeoff call - we’re actually pretty good at figuring out the algorithm for this feature but we just haven’t had the time to get it just perfect.
# Can I help this service somehow?
We’d love that! The simplest thing you can do is just ask questions and give a thumbs up or thumbs down feedback on the answer cards. That’s it. We log the searches and feedback anonymously, and use this data over time to hotspot issues and more importantly apply machine learning to improve the performance of the platform.
The other big thing would be just to let us know if we’re missing research content or if there’s a feature you think we’re badly missing to make your work even easier. We’re here to help at covid19@askmiso.com.
# Hmm, this doesn’t look right on my phone...
Yeah, we are unfortunately not mobile responsive. For the best user experience, we recommend you use COVID-19 Ask Miso Anything on your laptop, desktop, tablet or monitor.
# Anything we didn’t cover? Questions? Feedback?
Feel free to drop us a line at covid19@askmiso.com. We hope this helps and if you’re an organization on the frontlines of the fight against COVID-19 who feels like our tech or this specific platform could help your work directly, let us know. We’d love to help.
