Pandemic Response Challenge sponsored by Cognizant and organized by XPRIZE

The department’s team JSI vs COVID is competing in the $500K Pandemic Response Challenge sponsored by Cognizant and organized by XPRIZE. The goal of the first stage of the competition was to develop accurate predictors of COVID infections, which were then tested on the whole world. When the teams advancing to the second stage were announced, our predictor was in the first place on the internal leaderboard. It achieved this with a combination of a SEIR epidemiological model and machine learning. We are now working on the second stage, whose goal is to develop methods that recommend intervention plans with the best tradeoffs between the number of infections and the stringency of the interventions. We developed a web application for visualizing the plans, which you can see here (note that these plans are just examples, as the work is still in progress).