Many members of the DSI community are responding to the crisis through their respective disciplines. We will update datascience.columbia.edu with COVID-19-related news from our members, affiliates, alumni, and students throughout this crisis.
DSI Director Jeannette Wing Receives NSF Grant to Create COVID-19 Information Commons The website will facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration across various COVID research efforts, beginning with NSF-funded COVID Rapid Response Research (RAPID) projects, and serve as a resource for researchers and decision makers from government, academia, nonprofits, and industry to accelerate the most promising research. Contact: wing@columbia.edu
Queuing Safely for Elevator Systems Amidst a Pandemic Many people use elevators to get to their offices each day, but lengthy queues pose a significant public health risk during the COVID-19 pandemic. Columbia Engineering researchers, including DSI members Adam N. Elmachtoub and Clifford Stein, have explored solutions to this problem. Contact: adam@ieor.columbia.edu
Statistical Tool Developed at Columbia Will Track COVID-19 Data as New York Emerges From Lockdown Samir Bhatt, who is a senior lecturer in geostatistics at Imperial College London and New York State’s advisor on COVID-19 data, discusses his research team’s use of Stan, a statistical programming language created by a team led by Columbia University statistics and political science professor and Data Science Institute member Andrew Gelman, to quantify geographic variation in the spread of coronavirus. Contact: gelman@stat.columbia.edu
Columbia-IBM Center for Blockchain and Data Transparency COVID-19 Research Grant Recipients A special call focused on COVID-19-related research and aimed at delivering tangible results in six months. Areas of interest included secure sharing of health data, privacy preserving contact tracing, security and privacy of virtual meeting spaces, and other topics associated with the Center’s mission. Contact: ssputz@columbia.edu
DSI’s Center for Health Analytics Launches COVID-19 Data Challenge This COVID-19 data challenge is open to members of the Columbia University community. Each team of two to four members is allowed one non-affiliate member who is not the captain. The final project submission deadline is Friday, April 24, 2020, 11:59 p.m. EDT. Contact: itsik@cs.columbia.edu
Understanding and Predicting Adherence to COVID-19 Social Distancing Myles Ingram, who is a student in the M.S. in Data Science program and a research analyst at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, collaborated with Chin Hur and Ashley Zahabian to develop a model that predicted COVID-19 social distancing adherence on a state and county level based on a range of socioeconomic and demographic inputs. Their paper was published in the March 2021 edition of Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. Contact: mai2125@columbia.edu
CovidWatcher App Tracks Coronavirus Hot Spots in NYC Five DSI members and other collaborators across Columbia University have developed and launched an app that surveys users about their exposure to the coronavirus, symptoms, access to medical care, and impact on daily life. The data will be used to track the spread of the coronavirus in New York City, giving citizens real-time information about hot spots and enabling health care officials to deploy resources where needed most. Contact: noemie.elhadad@columbia.edu
COVID-19 Trial Finder Provides Simplified Search Process for COVID-Related Clinical Trials “Information overload is an unnecessary challenge for patients and clinicians seeking COVID-related trials,” says Chunhua Weng, a professor of biomedical informatics and Data Science Institute member. “The process of finding the right trial, based on location, eligibility, and any other factor, can be overwhelming and turn people off to the process.” Weng and a team of Columbia researchers have developed COVID-19 Trial Finder, a simplified method for patients, clinicians, and healthy volunteers to search for appropriate COVID-related clinical trials. Contact: cw2384@columbia.edu
Environmental Health Sciences Professor, DSI Affiliate Jeff Shaman on the Stealth Transmission of Coronavirus “Undetected cases expose a greater percentage of the population to the virus,” Shaman says. “And these stealth transmissions will continue to present a major challenge to the containment of this outbreak around the world.” Contact: jls106@columbia.edu
Business Professor, DSI Affiliate Oded Netzer on Making Sound Decisions During the Coronavirus Pandemic with Limited Data “Unprecedented realities, such as the one we are facing now with the COVID-19 pandemic, provide a challenge to this traditional practice of data science,” Netzer says. “In such situations, we have very limited historical or benchmark data to base our decisions on. Hence, we need to combine the limited data we observe, which are often far from perfect, with a good amount of intuition and domain specific acumen.” Contact: onetzer@gsb.columbia.edu
How Has COVID-19 Changed NYC Travel Patterns? “Will people cycle and walk more? Will they drive their cars more? Or will they return to mass transit? The surveys will help us understand those modal shifts and share that information with policymakers, which we hope will help residents of the metro area get to work and school more quickly and more safely.” Contact: sharon.di@columbia.edu
Law Professor, DSI Member Eric Talley, et al.: Coronavirus Is Becoming a “Majeure” Headache for Pending Corporate Deals The fate of these deals has been thrown into considerable doubt by the COVID-19 crisis. Corporate lawyers are scouring the terms of these deals for escape hatches that might unwind the transactions. Contact: etalley@law.columbia.edu
Biostatistician, DSI Member Jeff Goldsmith on the Importance of Data Science and Public Health Collaborations “This pandemic has shown the necessity of using data-driven approaches to contend with a public health challenge of an enormous magnitude,” says Goldsmith, an associate professor of biostatistics at the Mailman School of Public Health. Contact: jeff.goldsmith@columbia.edu
Columbia Business School Professor, DSI Member Carri Chan on How to Improve Hospital Operations in the Midst of a Pandemic Carri Chan, a hospital operations expert and an associate professor in the division of decision, risk, and operations at Columbia Business School, has spent the last decade developing data-driven models to improve the flow of patients through intensive care units. Since the onset of COVID-19, her expertise has been featured by Bloomberg, Fox News, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, and NBC.com. She reflects on how hospitals have been contending with the virus and how the pandemic has impacted her research. Contact: cwchan@columbia.edu
DSI Postdoctoral Fellow Aaron Schein Studies Text Messaging, Voter Engagement during 2020 Election, COVID-19 Friend-to-friend text messaging may be the new door-to-door canvassing leading up to the November election. A team led by postdoctoral fellow Aaron Schein found that receiving a message from a friend led to increased voter turnout during the 2018 midterm elections. The estimated effect was equivalent to door-to-door canvassing, an important finding in the social distancing era. Contact: aaron.schein@columbia.edu
Preparing Data Science Students to Excel in the Coronavirus Job Market The DSI career development team now hosts virtual mock interviews to prepare students to excel in a COVID-constricting job market. Alumni interview two to four students at a time about their technical skills and previous experiences. The sessions are also recorded—with permission, of course—for the students to review and refine their responses with career advisers. Contact: jh4253@columbia.edu
DSI Postdoctoral Fellows Volunteer to Stem Pandemic in NYC At the height of the outbreak in New York City, with personal protective equipment in short supply, DSI postdoctoral fellows Yevgeny Rakita Shlafstein and Gemma Moran volunteered to distribute masks and scrubs to local hospital employees, ensuring they had the equipment they needed to stay safe. Contact: yr2369@columbia.edu
DSI Alumni Use Machine Learning to Discover Coronavirus Treatments Andrew Satz and Brett Averso are chief executive officer and chief technology officer, respectively, of EVQLV, a startup creating algorithms capable of computationally generating, screening, and optimizing hundreds of millions of therapeutic antibodies. They apply their technology to discover treatments most likely to help those infected by the virus responsible for COVID-19.
DSI Alumni Connect Small Businesses and Neighborhood Customers The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the need for small, often family-owned, ventures to connect with local customers. Alimu Mijiti and Vincent Pan launched a location-based product search platform called iXopp (pronounced “I Shop”) in September 2020 to help small businesses connect with neighborhood customers. The platform now features more than 500 stores across restaurant, grocery, liquor, and hardware categories.
DSI Student Kevin Womack Discusses Navigating COVID-19 Disruptions with Dice.com Kevin Womack was in his last semester of the M.S. in data science program when the pandemic hit. Midway through the spring, everyone in his class went home, bringing uncertainty about midterms. Now, they had to connect remotely and work through time differences.
Below is a list of resources that might be useful and informative if you are looking for ways to contribute to research on COVID-19.
You may contact Sharon Sputz (ssputz@columbia.edu) if you would like to join one of the many COVID-19-related research teams across the University.
Are you already working on a COVID-19 project? Please complete an investigator survey and a project survey (one per project) ASAP.