Data Science to help fight COVID-19

In my talk, I described the work that I have been doing since March 2020, leading a multi-disciplinary team of 20+ volunteer scientists working very closely with the Presidency of the Valencian Government in Spain on 4 large areas: (1) human mobility modeling; (2) computational epidemiological models (both metapopulation, individual and LSTM-based models); (3) predictive models; and (4) a large-scale, online citizen surveys called the COVID19impactsurvey  (https://covid19impactsurvey.org) with almost 700,000 answers worldwide. This survey has enabled us to shed light on the impact that the pandemic is having on people's lives [3,4]. I presented the results obtained in each of these four areas, including winning the 500K XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge [1] and obtaining a best paper award at ECML-PKDD 2021 [2]. I shared the lessons learned in this very special initiative of collaboration between the civil society at large (through the survey), the scientific community (through the Expert Group) and a public administration (through the Commissioner at the Presidency level). For those interested in knowing more, WIRED magazine published an extensive article describing our story: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/valencia-ai-covid-data.