Predicting COVID-19 with AI techniques: current research and future directions

Artificial Intelligence (AI), since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of the last year, is playing an important role in supporting physicians and health authorities in different difficult tasks such as virus spreading, patient diagnosing and monitoring, contact tracing. In this paper, we provide an overview of the methods based on AI technologies proposed for COVID-19 forecasting. Summary statistics of the techniques adopted by researchers, categorized on the base of the underlying AI sub-area, are reported, along with publication venue of papers. The effectiveness of these approaches is investigated and their capabilities or weaknesses in providing reliable predictions are discussed. Future challenges are finally analyzed and research directions for improving current tools are suggested.