RALEIGH – Red Hat is not known necessarily as a life science firm, but the open source technology giant is going after COVID-19 as part of two new efforts to combat the global scourge.

The Hatters, which are part of IBM but remain based in Raleigh, disclosed the new efforts Monday:

  • Its Innovation Labs is working with the World Health Organization to boost the training of people to fight the pandemic as well as other health issues.
  • It has partnered with a Canada-based artificial intelligence firm tha has helped developed tools to better detect COVID-19 and to rank risks through chest imaging.

Bernardo Mariano, chief information officer and director of Digital Health at The World Health Organization said of the Red Hat effort:

“Working with Red Hat Open Innovation Labs provided a more flexible and responsive approach for creating solutions using open source technologies. We were able to build a DevOps platform that can not only deliver relevant, timely COVID-related information and knowledge to health workers globally, but one that can also scale and adapt to their future needs.”

A WHO team spent an eight-week virtual residency with Red Hat Open Innovation Labs “to help organizations integrate people, practices and technology to increase agility in the development of software and products, catalyze innovation and solve internal challenges in an accelerated time frame,” Red Hat explained.

The AI effort

On the AI front, Red Hat is partnering with DarwinAI, the University of Waterloo and Boston Children’s, a pediatric hospital, to advance a project called COVID-Net.

“The goal of this collaboration is to make it easier for clinicians to use COVID-Net in hospitals by means of a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) that sits atop Boston Children’s ChRIS framework using Red Hat OpenShift — the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes [an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management] platform that supports deployments across complex hybrid and multicloud infrastructures,” the partners explained.

Noted Chris Wright, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Red Hat: “At Red Hat, we pride ourselves on our open technologies hybrid cloud being used for the greater good. COVID-19 impacts us all, and we are proud to have Red Hat OpenShift be an underlying technology in COVID-Net, a platform designed to better help frontline healthcare workers when it comes to understanding this complex disease.”

Read more about the WHO effort online.

Read the details about the AI effort at this site.