The CoronaSurveys project, which aims to determine the prevalence of the pandemic in several countries, received an honourable mention and a prize of €3K (AWS – Amazon Web Services credits) at the “XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge”.
With the participation of Carlos Baquero, researcher at INESC TEC’s High-Assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab) and lecturer at UMinho, the CoronaSurveys project aims to assess the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide, in real-time. Users can access CoronaSurveys via the web or a mobile application, and the survey is available in 60 languages; people can also explore different outlooks on the pandemic’s evolution and risk levels. According to Carlos Baquero, the competition and respective recognition represented “an opportunity to work on the forecasting component. We developed evolution forecasts for 20-day periods, and compared the results obtained by all teams; the project’s results reached a quite satisfactory level, namely in view of the actual evolution of the pandemic.”
XPRIZE, the global leader in projects and operational stimulus competitions to address the challenges of humankind, and Cognizant, one of the leading entities in technology and services worldwide, designed this competition to explore the power of data and artificial intelligence. The goal is to provide policy makers with the insights and guidelines needed to implement public security measures that help keep local economies open, while minimising virus outbreaks, as vaccines become more widely available.
Antonio Fernandez Anta, from IMDEA Networks (a Spanish institute dedicated to research on data networks) is the leader of the team. In Portugal, and in addition to Carlos Baquero, the project team includes Raquel Menezes, also a lecturer at UMinho.
The INESC TEC researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with UMinho.
News, current topics, curiosities and so much more about INESC TEC and its community!
