Artificial Intelligence for the Novel Corona Virus (COVID-19) Pandemic: Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Directions

COVID-19 outbreak has created havoc around the world and has brought life to a disturbing halt claiming thousands of lives worldwide and infected cases rising every day. With technological advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI-based platforms can be used to deal with COVID-19 pandemic and accelerate the processes ranging from crowd surveillance to medical diagnosis. This paper renders a response to battle the virus through various AI techniques by making use of its subsets such as Machine Learning (ML), Deep learning (DL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). A survey of promising AI methods which could be used in various applications to facilitate the processes in this pandemic along potential of AI and challenges imposed are discussed thoroughly. This paper relies on the findings of the most recent research publications and journals on COVID-19 and suggests numerous relevant strategies. A case study on the impact of COVID-19 in various economic sectors is also discussed. The potential research challenges and future directions are also presented in the paper.