Multimedia Tools and Applications An International Journal : Pioneering AI, Data Science and Multimedia Techniques and Findings for COVID-19

COVID-19 is the greatest challenge human beings have encountered since World War 2 (WW2). It is highly infectious and has infected several million people worldwide. In early March 2020, the total number of infected cases was still not reaching 100,000. Since then, not only has the number of infections risen rapidly, so has the number of deaths, and the way we live has been greatly impacted, such as the need for social distancing.

There are urgent needs globally to understand how to tackle this challenge. In terms of computing and multimedia research, scientists can offer insights, recommendations and new discoveries, which may offer positive impacts and findings related to the causes, cure and analysis of treatment. The recent diagnosis of COVID-19 is based on real-time reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and regarded as the gold standard for confirmation of infection. It has already been widely recognized that advanced AI and Data Science techniques can potentially have a substantial role in streamlining and accelerating the diagnosis of COVID-19 patients, offering high-quality research outputs and accurate predictive modeling. Therefore, this requires pioneering methods such as deep learning, artificial intelligence and computational intelligence since they are highly important. Together with innovative multimedia techniques, innovative AI and Data Science for COVID-19 can provide added values for scientists. In this special issue, we seek high quality and unpublished work based on pioneering AI, Data Science and multimedia techniques and findings.