Google donates $ 1M to help CMU forecast COVID- 19 spread
Google is donating $ 1 million and 12 pro bono fellows to help Carnegie Mellon University better track and forecast the spread of COVID- 19.
Part of a larger donation pledge, the Mountain View, Calif.- based tech giant’s funds are going toward advancements to CMU’s COVIDcast, the university’s platform to collect and provide localized information about the novel coronavirus. It is run through CMU’s Delphi Research Group, which works on epidemiological forecasting.
Already, the online site reports data such as how many people visited a doctor because of COVID- 19 symptoms in an area and how much time people spend outside of their home.
The contributions from Google, which has offices in Pittsburgh, are meant to help COVIDcast provide a more geographically detailed view of the pandemic and offer an early warning to health officials when case numbers are expected to rise.
“It’s very useful for governments to make decisions about whether to tighten or loosen the mitigation strategies,” Roni Rosenfeld, co- leader of the Delphi Research Group and head of the Machine Learning Department, told the Post- Gazette in April when COVIDcast launched. “We’re able to tell them not only what’s going to happen but how will it change if you loosen things now.”
After months of collecting data from self- reported surveys, medical tests, hospital admissions and browser search terms related to the virus, COVIDcast began forecasting the spread of the virus in June and sharing those predictions with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July.
That type of work was nothing new for the Delphi group, which had been forecasting influenza for eight years, Mr. Rosenfeld said in the spring. Recently, the research team was named one of two National Centers for Excellence for Influenza Forecasting by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Before COVIDcast, Google had already partnered with the Delphi group for the past five years to collect search term data for work on forecasting seasonal influenza.
Google announced Thursday it would give over $ 8.5 million to 31 organizations to support data analytics and artificial intelligence projects focused on COVID- 19. CMU was one of three groups to receive pro bono support from the company as well.
The 12 fellows — which include software engineers, a product manager, a user experience researcher and a user experience designer — will spend six months working with the Delphi group.
Google’s support has been vital to CMU’s work around COVID- 19, Ryan Tibshirani, who co- leads the Delphi group, said in a prepared statement. Finding people and organizations who want to help, he said, is “the silver lining of the pandemic.”