Covid19/IT the digital side of Covid19: A picture from Italy with clustering and taxonomy

The Covid19 pandemic has significantly impacted on our lives, triggering a strong reaction resulting in vaccines, more effective diagnoses and therapies, policies to contain the pan- demic outbreak, to name but a few. A significant contribution to their success comes from the computer science and information technology communities, both in support to other dis- ciplines and as the primary driver of solutions for, e.g., diagnostics, social distancing, and contact tracing. In this work, we surveyed the Italian computer science and engineering community initiatives against the Covid19 pandemic. The 128 responses thus collected doc- ument the response of such a community during the first pandemic wave in Italy (February- May 2020), through several initiatives carried out by both single researchers and research groups able to promptly react to Covid19, even remotely. The data obtained by the survey are here reported, discussed and further investigated by Natural Language Processing tech- niques, to generate semantic clusters based on embedding representations of the surveyed activity descriptions. The resulting clusters have been then used to extend an existing Covid19 taxonomy with the classification of related research activities in computer science and information technology areas, summarizing this work contribution through a reproduc- ible survey-to-taxonomy methodology.