RAPID: Visual Analytics Approach to Real-Time Tracking of COVID-19

  • Funded by National Science Foundation (NSF)
  • Total publications:0 publications

Grant number: unknown

Grant search

Key facts

  • Disease

    COVID-19
  • Start & end year

    2020
    2021
  • Known Financial Commitments (USD)

    $187,477
  • Funder

    National Science Foundation (NSF)
  • Principal Investigator

    Raju Gottumukkala
  • Research Location

    United States of America
  • Lead Research Institution

    University of Louisiana at Lafayette
  • Research Priority Alignment

    N/A
  • Research Category

    Policies for public health, disease control & community resilience

  • Research Subcategory

    Communication

  • Special Interest Tags

    Data Management and Data Sharing

  • Study Type

    Not applicable

  • Clinical Trial Details

    N/A

  • Broad Policy Alignment

    Pending

  • Age Group

    Not Applicable

  • Vulnerable Population

    Not applicable

  • Occupations of Interest

    Not applicable

Abstract

COVID-19 data, related to infection rates, at-risk populations, mobility, and commute dynamics are rapidly becoming available from several sources. However, there is a lack of interactive visual decision-making environments integrated with data-driven tools to help public health and community leaders understand how various factors such as physical distancing and other mitigation strategies, impact the spread of disease, help flatten the curve, enabling economic recovery while minimizing public health risk due to reopening. This project will develop visual analytic tools for tracking COVID-19 and propose balanced intervention strategies for effective containment of the outbreak.

The proposed visual analytics system integrates heterogeneous datasets and enables the application of relevant analytical models and data-engineering for decision support in a complex and evolving crisis. The objectives include the development of (1) forecasting models for recovery based on incidence, population vulnerabilities, mobility patterns, and mitigation activities, (2) social-media tools to understand public sentiment and risk perceptions, (3) visual interface for model-refinement & diagnosis through data engineering and visual analytics principles. The decision-making framework will offer new insights, close the gap between data and decisions, and is driven-by inputs from extensive partnerships & collaborations to improve reliability and usability.

The data-driven tools will help improve decision makersí understanding of disease dynamics from multiple variables. Epidemiologists could potentially leverage these insights to create higher-fidelity models based on interventional factors and their effect on population behaviors. Local authorities could also utilize the models to make life-saving decisions while minimizing impact to the economy. The project will enable new public and private partnerships including the City of New Orleans, and Industry Advisory Board of NSF Center for Visual and Decision Informatics. The project will benefit graduate and undergraduate students through hands-on research experience with the development of analytical products. The project outcomes will include analytics dashboards, source code, models, and data collected from multiple sources. The dashboards, project descriptions, and a list of data sources along with their metadata will be made publicly available on www.vastream.net for a period of two years. The public facing portion of the portal for COVID-19 component will be moved to Amazon cloud in event of disruptions from outages, for the duration of the project. A new public repository will be created on GitHub, and the source code and publicly available datasets will be made available on this project repository.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.