Coronavirus Innovation Map

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“The Coronavirus Innovation Map is a platform of hundreds of innovations and solutions from around the world that help people cope and adapt to life amid the coronavirus pandemic, and to connect innovators.

The CoronaVirus Innovation Map is a visualized global database that is mapping the innovations related to tackling coronavirus in various fields such as diagnostics, treatment, lifestyle changes, etc., on a geographical scale….

Our goal with the Coronavirus Innovation Map is to build a crowdsourced resource that maps hundreds of innovations and solutions globally that help people cope and adapt to life amid the coronavirus, and to connect innovators.

This platform is a database for innovators to know who the other players are and where the projects or startups are located allowing them to connect and create solutions in this field. Policymakers will also be able to efficiently look for viable solutions in one place.

You may use the map to browse initiatives in specific locations (type a city or country in the search box), or choose a category wherein you would like to find a solution….(More)”

Responding to COVID-19 with AI and machine learning

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mihaela van der Schaar et al: “…AI and machine learning can use data to make objective and informed recommendations, and can help ensure that scarce resources are allocated as efficiently as possible. Doing so will save lives and can help reduce the burden on healthcare systems and professionals….

1. Managing limited resources

AI and machine learning can help us identify people who are at highest risk of being infected by the novel coronavirus. This can be done by integrating electronic health record data with a multitude of “big data” pertaining to human-to-human interactions (from cellular operators, traffic, airlines, social media, etc.). This will make allocation of resources like testing kits more efficient, as well as informing how we, as a society, respond to this crisis over time….

2. Developing a personalized treatment course for each patient 

As mentioned above, COVID-19 symptoms and disease evolution vary widely from patient to patient in terms of severity and characteristics. A one-size-fits-all approach for treatment doesn’t work. We also are a long way off from mass-producing a vaccine. 

Machine learning techniques can help determine the most efficient course of treatment for each individual patient on the basis of observational data about previous patients, including their characteristics and treatments administered. We can use machine learning to answer key “what-if” questions about each patient, such as “What if we postpone a couple hours before putting them on a ventilator?” or “Would the outcome for this patient be better if we switched them from supportive care to an experimental treatment earlier?”

3. Informing policies and improving collaboration

…It’s hard to get a clear sense of which decisions result in the best outcomes. In such a stressful situation, it’s also hard for decision-makers to be aware of the outcomes of decisions being made by their counterparts elsewhere. 

Once again, data-driven AI and machine learning can provide objective and usable insights that far exceed the capabilities of existing methods. We can gain valuable insight into what the differences between policies are, why policies are different, which policies work better, and how to design and adopt improved policies….

4. Managing uncertainty

….We can use an area of machine learning called transfer learning to account for differences between populations, substantially eliminating bias while still extracting usable data that can be applied from one population to another. 

We can also use methods to make us aware of the degree of uncertainty of any given conclusion or recommendation generated from machine learning. This means that decision-makers can be provided with confidence estimates that tell them how confident they can be about a recommended course of action.

5. Expediting clinical trials

Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) are generally used to judge the relative effectiveness of a new treatment. However, these trials can be slow and costly, and may fail to uncover specific subgroups for which a treatment may be most effective. A specific problem posed by COVID-19 is that subjects selected for RCTs tend not to be elderly, or to have other conditions; as we know, COVID-19 has a particularly severe impact on both those patient groups….

The AI and machine learning techniques I’ve mentioned above do not require further peer review or further testing. Many have already been implemented on a smaller scale in real-world settings. They are essentially ready to go, with only slight adaptations required….(More) (Full Paper)”.

Doctors Turn to Social Media to Develop Covid-19 Treatments in Real Time

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Smith and Michelle Fay Cortez at Bloomberg: “There is a classic process for treating respiratory problems: First, give the patient an oxygen mask, or slide a small tube into the nose to provide an extra jolt of oxygen. If that’s not enough, use a “Bi-Pap” machine, which pushes air into the lungs more forcefully. If that fails, move to a ventilator, which takes over the patient’s breathing.

But these procedures tend to fail With Covid-19 patients. Physicians found that by the time they reached that last step, it was often too late; the patient was already dying.

In past pandemics like the 2003 global SARS outbreak, doctors sought answers to such mysteries from colleagues in hospital lounges or maybe penned articles for medical journals. It could take weeks or months for news of a breakthrough to reach the broader community.

For Covid-19, a kind of medical hive mind is on the case. By the tens of thousands, doctors are joining specialized social media groups to develop answers in real time. One of them, a Facebook group called the PMG COVID19 Subgroup, has 30,000 members worldwide….

Doctors are trying to fill an information void online. Sabry, an emergency-room doctor in two hospitals outside Los Angeles, found that the 70,000-strong, Physician Moms Group she started five years ago on Facebook was so overwhelmed by coronavirus threads that she created the Covid-19 offshoot. So many doctors tried to join the new subgroup that Facebook’s click-to-join code broke. Some 10,000 doctors waited in line as the social media company’s engineers devised a fix.

She’s not alone. The topic also consumed two Facebook groups started by Dr. Nisha Mehta, a 38-year-old radiologist from Charlotte, North Carolina. The 54,000-member Physician Side Gigs, intended for business discussions, and an 11,000-person group called Physician Community for more general topics, are also all coronavirus, all the time, with thousands waiting to join…(More)”.

A Closer Look at Location Data: Privacy and Pandemics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Assessment by Stacey Gray: “In light of COVID-19, there is heightened global interest in harnessing location data held by major tech companies to track individuals affected by the virus, better understand the effectiveness of social distancing, or send alerts to individuals who might be affected based on their previous proximity to known cases. Governments around the world are considering whether and how to use mobile location data to help contain the virus: Israel’s government passed emergency regulations to address the crisis using cell phone location data; the European Commission requested that mobile carriers provide anonymized and aggregate mobile location data; and South Korea has created a publicly available map of location data from individuals who have tested positive. 

Public health agencies and epidemiologists have long been interested in analyzing device location data to track diseases. In general, the movement of devices effectively mirrors movement of people (with some exceptions discussed below). However, its use comes with a range of ethical and privacy concerns. 

In order to help policymakers address these concerns, we provide below a brief explainer guide of the basics: (1) what is location data, (2) who holds it, and (3) how is it collected? Finally we discuss some preliminary ethical and privacy considerations for processing location data. Researchers and agencies should consider: how and in what context location data was collected; the fact and reasoning behind location data being classified as legally “sensitive” in most jurisdictions; challenges to effective “anonymization”; representativeness of the location dataset (taking into account potential bias and lack of inclusion of low-income and elderly subpopulations who do not own phones); and the unique importance of purpose limitation, or not re-using location data for other civil or law enforcement purposes after the pandemic is over….(More)”.

Data Collaboratives in Response to COVID19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Living Repository: “This document is part of a call for action to build a responsible infrastructure for data-driven pandemic response. 

It serves as a living repository for data collaboratives seeking to address the spread of COVID-19 and its secondary effects. 

> You can find ongoing data collaborative projects here

> Requests for data and expertise that might lead to data collaboratives can be found here.

> Data competitions, challenges, and calls for proposals, which can lead to useful tools to combat COVID-19, can be found here.

The repository aims to include projects that show a commitment to privacy protection, data responsibility, and overall user well-being. 

It will be updated regularly as we receive projects and proposals or otherwise become aware of them. 

HELP US MAKE THIS REPOSITORY BETTER:  Individuals are encouraged to edit the repo and/or suggest additions to this document if a project is not currently listed.

See full Living Repository here.

Cellphone tracking could help stem the spread of coronavirus. Is privacy the price?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kelly Servick at Science: “…At its simplest, digital contact tracing might work like this: Phones log their own locations; when the owner of a phone tests positive for COVID-19, a record of their recent movements is shared with health officials; owners of any other phones that recently came close to that phone get notified of their risk of infection and are advised to self-isolate. But designers of a tracking system will have to work out key details: how to determine the proximity among phones and the health status of users, where that information gets stored, who sees it, and in what format.

Digital contact tracing systems are already running in several countries, but details are scarce and privacy concerns abound. Protests greeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rollout this week of a surveillance program that uses the country’s domestic security agency to track the locations of people potentially infected with the virus. South Korea has released detailed information on infected individuals—including their recent movements—viewable through multiple private apps that send alerts to users in their vicinity. “They’re essentially texting people, saying, ‘Hey, there’s been a 60-year-old woman who’s positive for COVID. Click this for more information about her path,’” says Anne Liu, a global health expert at Columbia University. She warns that the South Korean approach risks unmasking and stigmatizing infected people and the businesses they frequent.

But digital tracking is probably “identifying more contacts than you would with traditional methods,” Liu says. A contact-tracing app might not have much impact in a city where a high volume of coronavirus cases and extensive community transmission has already shuttered businesses and forced citizens inside, she adds. But it could be powerful in areas, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, that are at an earlier stage of the outbreak, and where isolating potential cases could avert the need to shut down all schools and businesses. “If you can package this type of information in a way that protects individual privacy as best you can, it can be something positive,” she says.

Navigating privacy laws

In countries with strict data privacy laws, one option for collecting data is to ask telecommunications and other tech companies to share anonymous, aggregated information they’ve already gathered. Laws in the United States and the European Union are very specific about how app and device users must consent to the use of their data—and how much information companies must disclose about how those data will be used, stored, and shared. Working within those constraints, mobile carriers in Germany and Italy have started to share cellphone location data with health officials in an aggregated, anonymized format. Even though individual users aren’t identified, the data could reveal general trends about where and when people are congregating and risk spreading infection.

Google and Facebook are both in discussions with the U.S. government about sharing anonymized location data, The Washington Post reported this week. U.S. companies have to deal with a patchwork of state and federal privacy regulations, says Melissa Krasnow, a privacy and data security partner at VLP Law Group. App and devicemakers could face user lawsuits for sharing data in a way that wasn’t originally specified in their terms of service—unless federal or local officials pass legislation that would free them from liability. “Now you’ve got a global pandemic, so you would think that [you] would be able to use this information for the global good, but you can’t,” Krasnow says. “There’s expectations about privacy.”

Another option is to start fresh with a coronavirus-specific app that asks users to voluntarily share their location and health data. For example, a basic symptom-checking app could do more than just keeping people who don’t need urgent care out of overstretched emergency rooms, says Samuel Scarpino, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University. Health researchers could use also use location data from the app to estimate the size of an outbreak. “That could be done, I think, without risking being evil,” he says.

For Scarpino, the calculus changes if governments want to track the movements of a specific person who has coronavirus relative to the paths of other people, as China and South Korea have apparently done. That kind of tracking “could easily swing towards a privacy violation that isn’t justified by the potential public health benefit,” he says….(More)”.

Governments could track COVID-19 lockdowns through social media posts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alfred Ng at CNET: “Your posts on social media have been harvested for advertising. They’ve been taken to build up a massive facial recognition database. Now that same data could be used by companies and governments to help maintain quarantines during the coronavirus outbreak. 

Ghost Data, a research group in Italy and the US, collected more than half a million Instagram posts in March, targeting regions in Italy where residents were supposed to be on lockdown. It provided those images and videos to LogoGrab, an image recognition company that can automatically identify people and places. The company found at least 33,120 people violated Italy’s quarantine orders. 

Andrea Stroppa, the founder of Ghost Data, said his group has offered its research to the Italian government. Stroppa doesn’t consider the social media scraping to be a privacy concern because researchers anonymized the data by removing profile and specific location data before analyzing it. He also has public health on his mind. 

“In our view, privacy is very important. It’s a fundamental human right,” Stroppa said. “However, it’s important to give our support to help the government and the authorities. Hundreds of people are dying every day.”…(More)” .

Can location data from smartphones help slow the coronavirus? Facebook is giving academics a chance to try

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rebecca Robbins at Statnews: “It’s emerging as one of the more promising — and potentially controversial — ideas to slow the spread of the coronavirus: collecting smartphone data to track where people have gone and who they’ve crossed paths with.

The White House has discussed the notion, and several companies are reportedly in talks with the Trump administration to share aggregated user data. Researchers in the U.K. are working on one such app, and a team led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is building another, with an eye toward protecting user privacy. China and South Korea developed their own smartphone surveillance systems to try to clamp down on their own outbreaks, though their approaches likely wouldn’t be palatable in countries with greater expectations of privacy.

Then there’s Facebook, which collects data from its users around the world who opt in to sharing their location when using its smartphone app. Facebook does not share this information with governments. But in recent weeks, the social media giant has been sharing these data — in aggregated and anonymized form — with academic and nonprofit researchers analyzing the spread of the coronavirus.

Among the universities where Covid-19 researchers are harnessing Facebook’s data: the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, University of Pavia in Italy, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

The idea is to study where people move and how often they encounter each other, in the hope of better understanding the virus’ spread — and which places are likely to soon see a spike in cases….(More)”.

The US lacks health information technologies to stop COVID-19 epidemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Niam Yaraghi at Brookings: “The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the crucial importance of health information technology and data interoperability. The pandemic has shattered our common beliefs about the type and scope of health information exchange. It has shown us that the definition of health data should no longer be limited to medical data of patients and instead should encompass a much wider variety of data types from individuals’ online and offline activity. Moreover, the pandemic has proven that healthcare is not local. In an interconnected world, with more individuals traveling long distances than ever before, it is naïve to look at regions in isolation from each other and try to manage public health independently. To efficiently manage a pandemic like this, the scope of health information exchange efforts should not be limited to small geographical regions and instead should be done at least nationally, if not internationally.

HEALTH DATA SHOULD GO BEYOND MEDICAL RECORDS

A wide variety of factors affect one’s overall well-being, a very small fraction of which could be quantified via medical records. We tend to ignore this fact, and try to explain and predict a patient’s condition only based on medical data. Previously, we did not have the technology and knowledge to collect huge amounts of non-medical data and analyze it for healthcare purposes. Now, privacy concerns and outdated regulations have exacerbated the situation and has led to a fragmented data ecosystem. Interoperability, even among healthcare providers, remains a major challenge where exchange and analysis of non-medical data for healthcare purposes almost never happens….(More)”.

Commission tells carriers to hand over mobile data in coronavirus fight

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Scott, Laurens Cerulus and Laura Kayali at Politico: “The European Commission on Monday urged Europe’s telecoms giants including Deutsche Telekom and Orange to share reams of people’s mobile data from across the region to help predict the spread of the coronavirus.

In a conference call with telecoms executives, Thierry Breton, Europe’s internal market commissioner, called on the companies to hand over anonymized and aggregated data from people’s mobile phones to track how the virus was spreading, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The draft plans would allow the Commission — and not the carriers — to manage how the data was used, and give EU officials control over so-called metadata on hundreds of millions of people’s mobile phones. That represents a significant step for Brussels as it would make the EU executive liable for any hefty fines if the digital information was hacked or misused.

Speaking to POLITICO, Breton confirmed the request to carriers, adding that the Commission needed such aggregated metadata to track the spread of the virus and determine where people’s need for medical supplies was the most pressing.

“We will select one big operator by country,” Breton said. “We want to be very fast and follow this on a daily basis.”

The Commission insisted the operation would respect the bloc’s privacy rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, and e-privacy legislation. The European Data Protection Supervisor would also be involved, the EU executive added. ..

In recent weeks, mobile operators have started to share anonymized data with EU governments in response to the spread of COVID-19. Carriers involved in the discussions with the Commission said Breton’s request would likely include providing the same type of data, and would have to respect the region’s tough privacy rules….

By aiming to pool large amounts of European mobile data, the Commission is following in the footsteps of national agencies, many of which are already working with carriers to track the spread of the virus through such anonymized digital information.

In Norway, local researchers saw a 60 percent decline in people traveling between cities after a countrywide lockdown was introduced — figures that were taken from people’s mobile phone data provided by Telenor, the national carrier.

Yet as the crisis has continued, countries such as Spain and Poland have gone a step further by creating smartphone apps, which offer an even greater ability to track and monitor people’s movements compared to anonymized mobile data. In the U.K., an app is in the works but has not yet launched….(More)”.