Big data and Covid-19 – Interview about human behavior and automated contact tracing with Dr. Hyunju Kim and Dr. Ayan Paul #077

Big data management to understand human behavior, the
spread of diseases and the implementation of possible contact
tracing - these are the topics that I discussed with the
physicists Dr. Hyunju Kim and Dr. Ayan Paul. Both are working on
pioneering international research projects to understand and to
manage the spread of Covid-19. What are the first findings of the
new research?


Nearly one year ago we had an inspiring podcast Interview
about the Question “What is intelligence?  Hyunju and Ayan
shared some of their amazing research results. For those who are
interested in listening to this podcast episode. It is the
podcast number 14. You find it here:
LINK.


Now both of them started new researches and studies about
a very current topic.  They are about the mitigation of
viruses and especially about automated contact tracing and the
game of big numbers in time of Covid-19. In addition, Ayan
co-founded a company that is backed by DESY and is developing a
smartphone app to calculate individual risk to COVID-19 based on
AI and medical literature.


 


More Information and the papers you can find here:
1. Automated Contact Tracing: a game of big numbers in the time
of COVID-19

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.22.20071043v2


Abstract


One of the more widely advocated solutions for slowing down the
spread of COVID-19 has been automated contact tracing. Since
proximity data can be collected by personal mobile devices, the
natural proposal has been to use this for automated contact
tracing providing a major gain over a manual implementation. In
this work, we study the characteristics of voluntary and
automated contact tracing and its effectiveness for mapping the
spread of a pandemic due to the spread of SARS-CoV-2. We
highlight the infrastructure and social structures required for
automated contact tracing to work. We display the vulnerabilities
of the strategy to inadequate sampling of the population, which
results in the inability to sufficiently determine significant
contact with infected individuals. Of crucial importance will be
the participation of a significant fraction of the population for
which we derive a minimum threshold. We conclude that relying
largely on automated contact tracing without population-wide
participation to contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic
can be counterproductive and allow the pandemic to spread
unchecked. The simultaneous implementation of various mitigation
methods along with automated contact tracing is necessary for
reaching an optimal solution to contain the pandemic.
2. Socio-economic disparities and COVID-19 in the USA

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.10.20192138v1
Abstract:

COVID-19 is not a universal killer. We study the spread of
COVID-19 at the county level for the United States up until the
15th of August, 2020. We show that the prevalence of the disease
and the death rate are correlated with the local socio-economic
conditions often going beyond local population density
distributions, especially in rural areas. We correlate the
COVID-19 prevalence and death rate with data from the US Census
Bureau and point out how the spreading patterns of the disease
show asymmetries in urban and rural areas separately and is
preferentially affecting the counties where a large fraction of
the population is non-white. Our findings can be used for more
targeted policy building and deployment of resources for future
occurrence of a pandemic due to SARS-CoV-2. Our methodology,
based on interpretable machine learning and game theory, can be
extended to study the spread of other diseases.
3. App: empowering health decision, delivered by AI - use our
smart algorithm securely to check your risk of COVID-19, protect
yourself and loved ones.
https://www.covishealth.com/       

Contact via LinkedIn:


Hyunju Kim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hyunju-kim-0b32a3133/


Ayan Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayan--paul/


Maria Hoffacker: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-maria-hoffacker-25373ab/


Video of this Podcast Episode on YouTube:
https://www.drmariahoffacker.com/Video77


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