New Opportunities and Challenges to Information Technology Researchers and Professionals due to COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a massive global public health crisis and has caused social upheavals, disrupted business and industry and has affected the economy, life and work worldwide. The spreading of contagious Corona virus fear has forced to follow social distancing and staying at home agenda and is forcing executives, managers and policy makers worldwide to quickly implement business and operational decisions. They are embracing technology to address the crisis in a fast pace. The fully automated digitization and online communication and transaction which could not been happened for the last ten years; that abrupt changes are happening all around the World in few months. COVID-19 has presented IT industry, professionals and researchers several new opportunities as well as new challenges. All are forced to live, work, learn, and socialize in a new environment with constraints. This paper is an attempt to review the increasing and varied role of AI in different spheres of business and operational decisions at this critical juncture of time and evaluate the new opportunities and challenges to be faced by IT Industries and Research Institute. This paper also gives an insight into COVID NET, a recent Deep Convolutional Neural Network Design which is the first open source network designs for COVID-19 detection.