More free, discounted tech for governments responding to COVID-19

Cloud contributions

Splunk is offering a free program, Remote Work Insights, to help new and existing federal, state and local government agency customers manage applications, monitor business performance and secure networks from remote locations. RWI provides real-time visibility across multiple disparate systems, such as VPN and Microsoft 365, alongside executive-level dashboards to boost productivity of mission-critical activities. RWI can be used as a standalone dashboard and platform for best practices or as an add-on for current Splunk customers. Read more here.

Digital Ocean, a cloud infrastructure provider, is donating $100,000 in infrastructure credits as well as promotion and publicity for new, not-for-profit projects related to COVID-19. Examples of potential projects include applications or online resources designed to educate, coordinate help or track the virus; hackathons or virtual challenges; tools that support online education; or projects that help small businesses impacted by the virus. More here.

Researchers working on COVID-19 diagnostics, treatments and vaccines can apply for a free license to Lifebit Biotech’s Lifebit CloudOS, an end-to-end fully federated cloud operating system specifically engineered for life sciences data access, collaboration, and analysis. 

Other free cloud resources for COVID-19 applications can be found here.

Security

Identity, an intelligent identity solution provider for the enterprise, is offering new customers six months of free cloud single sign-on and multi-factor authentication services for unlimited applications. More info here.

BlackBerry will be offering a range of its secure communication solutions, including SecuSUITE for Government, free of charge for a 60-day period to help organizations manage and secure remote employees. Read more here.

Transit infrastructure

To support cities and businesses that deliver transportation services, Ford Mobility subsidiaries TransLoc, Ride Systems and DoubleMap are offering transit agencies free consulting and demand-response software to help them quickly deploy a responsive service to support evolving rider needs and adhere to quickly-changing health guidelines.  Apply here.  

Traffic analytics company StreetLight Data is offering free access to its new Vehicles Miles Traveled application to help transportation planners measure the transportation-related impact of the pandemic on communities that depend on gas taxes for revenue. StreetLight worked with Cuebiq, a location intelligence firm to transform GPS data into contextualized, aggregated and normalized travel patterns and build deep repositories of historical VMT data. The map and data will be accessible for free to all planners, researchers and engineers, as well as the general public and StreetLight's current customers.

Communications and outreach

Email solutions provider Validity announced Validity for Good, a free crisis communications program for government agencies and organizations that send critical emails, such as those related to the coronavirus pandemic. With Validity for Good, agencies and organizations are temporarily granted access to the company’s email delivery certification offering that gives email campaigns trusted treatment to help ensure that critical emails related to public safety and COVID-19 arrive in inboxes, not spam folders.

Aisera, an AI-enabled customer experience company, announced that it is offering its remote working virtual assistant and collaboration app free for 60 days to help health care organizations, government agencies and businesses provide customer service during the global pandemic. More here.

Granicus, a provider of cloud-based citizen engagement services for the public sector, announced a new set of easily embeddable web tools that aggregate, curate and present COVID-19 content from trusted government sources for widespread community access. These FedRAMP authorized tools are free for a limited time and are available to any local, state or federal government organization to use on their website for COVID-19 related communications. More info.

High performance help

D-Wave Systems, a manufacturer of quantum computers, is offering free access to its Leap 2 hybrid quantum cloud service to anyone who’s working on responses to the coronavirus outbreak in the 35 countries across North America, Europe, and Asia where access is available. Leap 2 includes the hybrid solver service designed to bring both classical and quantum resources to quickly and precisely solve highly complex problems with up to 10,000 fully connected variables.

IBM is making its conversational AI platform, Watson Assistant for Citizens, available free of charge for at least 90 days to help improve wait times for calls being made to government agencies, health care organizations and academic institutions. The public-cloud-based service brings together Watson Assistant, natural language processing capabilities and enterprise AI search to understand and respond to common questions about COVID-19. Learn more here.

Other high-performance computing resources for COVID-19 applications can be found here.

Workflow assistance

Governments and health care organizations that need help processing paper, scanned or faxed forms related to COVID-19 pandemic can get free access to Vidado’s automated processing software to help extract and digitize handwritten data, printed text, checkboxes and signatures on health forms.

Aurigo a provider of cloud-based planning and portfolio management tools, is announcing a six-month Open Collaboration Program for small- and mid-size government agencies that must now deliver and manage their capital assets and infrastructure programs remotely. Aurigo Essentials Cloud enables document sharing, construction management and remote collaboration for organizations that do not currently have a system in place. The company is waiving all fees for the first six months, and there is no compulsion to convert to a paid subscription at the end of this period, CEO Balaji Sreenivasan announced.

Scoutbee, a digital procurement and supply chain management company, is offering free COVID-19 emergency supply chain support to help organizations conduct rapid emergency supplier-search for critical and scarce items such as surgical masks, protective suits, cotton swabs and more. Purchasers or suppliers fill out a form, and Scoutbee will reply within 48 hours with a recommendation.  

Krisp, which provides AI-powered noise cancellation and room echo removal from phone calls, is offering free unlimited service to students, teachers, hospital and government workers worldwide. More here.

Open source COVID-19 response data

Public Invention, an organization dedicated to democratizing invention, has put together a GitHub repo listing open-source ventilator projects that includes the project name, description, link and contact information as well as scores on the projects’ openness, buildability, community support, functional testing, reliability testing, COVID suitability and clinician friendliness.

DarwinAI, an artificial intelligence startup, has released onto GitHub its COVID-Net, an open-source deep convolutional neural network design tailored for the detection of COVID-19 cases from chest radiography images  The accompanying dataset, COVIDx has more than 16,756 chest radiography images across 13,645 patient cases from two open access data repositories.

Elsevier's Novel Coronavirus Information Center is offering expert, curated information for the research and health community on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. All resources are free to access and include guidelines for clinicians and patients. It is also making its  Veridata Electronic Data Capture R&D tool to capture patient data for clinical research available for free, along with a number of other free or discounted services.