III: Medium: A Data-driven and AI-augmented Framework for Collaborative Decision Making to Combat Infectious Disease Outbreaks

Infectious disease outbreaks, such as the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, entailed localized conditions with evolution in time and space present a daunting task for policy and decision makers in finding optimal non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) strategies at different scales that balance epidemiological benefits and socioeconomic costs. To help tackle this challenging problem, by harnessing the data revolution and advancing capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), this multidisciplinary project aims to design and develop a data-driven and AI-augmented framework that is tailored to the evolving localized conditions and enables expert-in-the-loop for adaptive NPIs to effectively respond to the dynamics of epidemic while balancing the multidimensional socioeconomic impacts. The proposed work will not only benefit local and federal governments, regional communities, corporations, societal leaders and the public by assisting with effective responses to the public health issues while mitigating negative socioeconomic impacts and various induced crises, but will also facilitate the development of robust science-based decision support systems responding to future natural or man-made disasters. The research will be beneficial to multidisciplinary areas, including data science, machine learning, epidemiology, economics, social and behavioral sciences. The outcomes (e.g., open-source code, data, and models) will be made publicly accessible and broadly distributed through publications, media presses, etc. This project will integrate research with education, including novel curriculum development, student mentoring, professional training and workforce development, and K-12 outreach activities aimed at underrepresented groups. To combat infectious disease outbreaks with robust response planning, this project includes four interconnected research components to develop an intelligent and interactive decision support framework that allows in silico exploration of extensive possible NPIs prior to the potential field implementation phase. First, the team will develop a novel spatial-temporal heterogeneous graph model to abstract dynamics of harnessed multi-source data. Second, the team will develop new techniques to learn node (i.e., area) representations over the constructed graph by integrating both spatial and temporal dependencies while preserving the heterogeneity. Third, based on the learned node representations, given a set of NPIs, the team will design and develop an innovative NPI-aware multi-head transformer for multi-task prediction (i.e., forecasting epidemic dynamics and associated socioeconomic impacts). Fourth, based on the predictions, the team will develop a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning model with inverse reward learning to enable expert-in-the-loop in finding optimal sequential NPIs that balance epidemiological benefits and socioeconomic costs under certain constraints and objectives set by policy and decision makers. The research will advance the field of information integration and informatics through the development of a series of original works including novel deep graph learning techniques with the context of heterogeneous and dynamic graph structures, which will also provide foundational work for addressing similar challenges for future natural or man-made disasters. 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.