COVID-19 outbreak has put the whole world in an unprecedented difficult situation bringing life around the world to a frightening halt and claiming thousands of lives. Due to COVID-19's spread in 212 countries and territories and increasing numbers of infected cases and death tolls mounting to 5,212,172 and 334,915 (as of May 22 2020), it remains a real threat to the public health system. This paper renders a response to combat the virus through Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some Deep Learning (DL) methods have been illustrated to reach this goal, including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), and Long /Short Term Memory (LSTM). It delineates an integrated bioinformatics approach in which different aspects of information from a continuum of structured and unstructured data sources are put together to form the user-friendly platforms for physicians and researchers. The main advantage of these AI-based platforms is to accelerate the process of diagnosis and treatment of the COVID-19 disease. The most recent related publications and medical reports were investigated with the purpose of choosing inputs and targets of the network that could facilitate reaching a reliable Artificial Neural Network-based tool for challenges associated with COVID-19. Furthermore, there are some specific inputs for each platform, including various forms of the data, such as clinical data and medical imaging which can improve the performance of the introduced approaches toward the best responses in practical applications.

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The spread of SARS-CoV-2 can be considered one of the most complicated patterns with a large number of uncertainties and nonlinearities. Therefore, analysis and prediction of the distribution of this virus are one of the most challenging problems, affecting the planning and managing of its impacts. Although different vaccines and drugs have been proved, produced, and distributed one after another, several new fast-spreading SARS-CoV-2 variants have been detected. This is why numerous techniques based on artificial intelligence (AI) have been recently designed or redeveloped to forecast these variants more effectively. The focus of such methods is on deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML), and they can forecast nonlinear trends in epidemiological issues appropriately. This short review aims to summarize and evaluate the trustworthiness and performance of some important AI-empowered approaches used for the prediction of the spread of COVID-19. Sixty-five preprints, peer-reviewed papers, conference proceedings, and book chapters published in 2020 were reviewed. Our criteria to include or exclude references were the performance of these methods reported in the documents. The results revealed that although methods under discussion in this review have suitable potential to predict the spread of COVID-19, there are still weaknesses and drawbacks that fall in the domain of future research and scientific endeavors.

Complex phenomena have some common characteristics, such as nonlinearity, complexity, and uncertainty. In these phenomena, components typically interact with each other and a part of the system may affect other parts or vice versa. Accordingly, the human brain, the Earth’s global climate, the spreading of viruses, the economic organizations, and some engineering systems such as the transportation systems and power grids can be categorized into these phenomena. Since both analytical approaches and AI methods have some specific characteristics in solving complex problems, a combination of these techniques can lead to new hybrid methods with considerable performance. This is why several types of research have recently been conducted to benefit from these combinations to predict the spreading of COVID-19 and its dynamic behavior. In this review, 80 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, conference proceedings, and preprints with a focus on employing hybrid methods for forecasting the spreading of COVID-19 published in 2020 have been aggregated and reviewed. These documents have been extracted from Google Scholar and many of them have been indexed on the Web of Science. Since there were many publications on this topic, the most relevant and effective techniques, including statistical models and deep learning (DL) or machine learning (ML) approach, have been surveyed in this research. The main aim of this research is to describe, summarize, and categorize these effective techniques considering their restrictions to be used as trustable references for scientists, researchers, and readers to make an intelligent choice to use the best possible method for their academic needs. Nevertheless, considering the fact that many of these techniques have been used for the first time and need more evaluations, we recommend none of them as an ideal way to be used in their project. Our study has shown that these methods can hold the robustness and reliability of statistical methods and the power of computation of DL ones.

The aim of the present study is to analyse the image of Iran, created by E. G. Browne (1862-1926) in his travelogue A Year amongst the Persians. In his representation, Browne vacillates between two poles of Romantic and scientific discourses. On the one hand, he is a Romantic wanderer, who embarks on a quest of Departure, Initiation and Return in the space of the Other (Campbell, 2004, p. 28). Based on such an idealistic perspective, in his one year quest in Iran which is mainly spend among the marginalized believers of the Bahai faith, Browne (1893) seeks for a rebirth of the decaying Iranian nation, "which slumbers, but is not dead"(p. 219). On the other hand, Browne (1893) regards himself as an "inquirer" who in his observations maintains a detached scientific perspective towards Iranian culture and society, and does not hesitate to question the principles which he finds unacceptable (p. 529). In the course of his journey, the tension between these two discourses leads to a subversion of both of them, which finally mirrors in a breakdown of Browne's conception of Self and the Other. Browne's recognition of the Self and the Iranian nation, at the end of his journey is through the space of inter-subjectivity. This final state of in-betweenness makes it possible for him to recognize the Other from the perspective of cultural difference, through which a possibility is created in his image of Iran to escape the "urge to possess" that the Orientalist discourse of travel writing entails.