MIT Hacking Racism Challenge in Healthcare: Expectations
Slice of MIT: Hundreds of Teams Converge Online for MIT Covid-19 Challenge Hackathons
Slice of MIT – Ken Shulman – September 23, 2020
It was early March 2020. The US and the world were bracing for the outbreak of a dangerous viral pandemic. Most members of the MIT community had left the campus and returned to their homes—many of them to homes abroad. For Alfonso Martinez MBA ’20 and Freddy T. Nguyen, the Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and a pathology resident at Mount Sinai Hospital, there was only one logical response: a hackathon.
“We had an impending pandemic that was going to create myriad problems across the globe,” says Nguyen, a co-organizer, along with Martinez, of the MIT Covid-19 Challenge. Since March, the MIT community-led initiative has staged seven hackathons addressing the pandemic. “We needed to define the problems facing us and create a structure that could produce solutions quickly. At the same time, we had hundreds of our people with mad skills confined to their homes with nowhere to apply those skills. From our perspective, a hackathon was a no-brainer.”
An Unsupervised Machine Learning Approach to Assess the ZIP Code Level Impact of COVID-19 in NYC
New York City has been recognized as the world’s epicenter of the novel Coronavirus pandemic. To identify the key inherent factors that are highly correlated to the Increase Rate of COVID-19 new cases in NYC, we propose an unsupervised machine learning framework. Based on the assumption that ZIP code areas with similar demographic, socioeconomic, and mobility patterns are likely to experience similar outbreaks, we select the most relevant features to perform a clustering that can best reflect the spread, and map them down to 9 interpretable categories. We believe that our findings can guide policy makers to promptly anticipate and prevent the spread of the virus by taking the right measures.
By Every Measure – Explores the Undeniable Data of Systemic Racism: Episode 6 – Health
By Every Measure – 88Nine Radio Milwaukee – Tarik Moody –
In “By Every Measure,” 88Nine Radio Milwaukee’s (WYMS-88.9 FM) new podcast, award-winning data expert and research journalist Reggie Jackson and 88Nine’s Director of Digital Strategy & Innovation Tarik Moody explore systemic racism in various sectors of Milwaukee, looking closely at how those systems were formed and how they can – and need – to be changed.
Episode 6 – Health: With a global pandemic as the backdrop, hosts Tarik Moody and Reggie Jackson analyze health disparities Black people face in America, including bias in healthcare, infant mortality and COVID-19. Then, Tarik assembles a panel of experts from MIT, Froedtert and the Medical College of Wisconsin and the City of Milwaukee Health Department to examine possible solutions.
MIT COVID-19 Datathon: data without boundaries
The COVID-19 virus is a formidable global threat, impacting all aspects of society and exacerbating the existing inequities of our current social systems. As we battle the virus across multiple fronts, data are critical for understanding this disease and for coordinating an effective global response. Given the current digitisation of so many aspects of life, we are amassing data that can be extrapolated and analysed for the effective forecasting, prevention and treatment of COVID-19. With responsible stewardship, the tools and data-driven solutions currently in development for the COVID-19 pandemic will serve in the present while providing a much-needed foundation for a data-based response to future outbreaks and disasters.
In response to COVID-19, and using data generated thus far, groups at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts, Google Cloud, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) Innovations Group and Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians at BIDMC came together to host the MIT Challenge COVID-19 Datathon (COVID-19 Datathon) from 10–16 May 2020. A ‘datathon’ adopts the ‘hackathon’ model, with a focus on data and data science methodologies, which promotes collaboration, design thinking and problem solving. In a typical hackathon, participants with disparate but complementary backgrounds work together in small groups for a prescribed and intensive ‘sprint’, typically over the course of one weekend, to develop a new concept, product or business idea. Subject matter expert ‘mentors’’ oversee and advise the teams. At the conclusion of the event, the teams present to a panel of judges. Winners are selected and are typically awarded seed funding. Datathons differ from hackathons in that the output is data analysis. MIT Critical Data, one of the organising groups of the COVID-19 Datathon, has hosted 36 international healthcare datathons.
MIT COVID-19 Challenge: India Turning the Tide – Awards
MIT COVID-19 Challenge: India Turning the Tide – Kickoff
BIO Africa 2020 | Innovation & Collaboration in the Time of COVID-19 – Accelerating R&D to Save Lives
While no corner of the world has remained untouched by COVID-19, battling the pandemic is particularly challenging in resource-limited settings. In this session, learn how African countries are leveraging local and global technology and expertise to fight COVID-19. Hear about a Nigerian-American partnership that is using 3D printers to scale up personal protective equipment (PPE) production for African healthcare workers. Meet two leaders—one from a multinational pharmaceutical company, and one from a global engineering powerhouse—who are spearheading initiatives to catalyze innovative Africa-centric solutions to the pandemic. Listen to a scientist from the Rwandan Ministry of Health discuss her government’s technology-driven response to COVID-19—a response that has been heralded as a success story in the international press.
MIT News: What is the Covid-19 data tsunami telling policymakers?
MIT News – Kim Martineau | MIT Quest for Intelligence – July 1, 2020
Uncertainty about the course of the Covid-19 pandemic continues, with more than 2,500,000 known cases and 126,000 deaths in the United States alone. How to contain the virus, limit its damage, and address the deep-rooted health and racial inequalities it has exposed are now urgent topics for policymakers. Earlier this spring, 300 data scientists and health care professionals from around the world joined the MIT Covid-19 Datathon to see what insights they might uncover.
“It felt important to be a part of,” says Ashley O’Donoghue, an economist at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “We thought we could produce something that might make a difference.”
Participants were free to explore five tracks: the epidemiology of Covid-19, its policy impacts, its disparate health outcomes, the pandemic response in New York City, and the wave of misinformation Covid-19 has spawned. After splitting into teams, participants were set loose on 20 datasets, ranging from county-level Covid-19 cases compiled by The New York Times to a firehose of pandemic-related posts released by Twitter.
Rice Magazine: Pivoting in a Pandemic
Rice Magazine – Freddy Nguyen, David Levin – June 28, 2020
As a pathology resident and research scientist, I’m refocusing my work to help evaluate convalescent plasma as a treatment option for COVID-19 patients.
New York is supposed to be the city that never sleeps. Things are supposed to happen around the clock every day of the year — but right now, the entire city is on lockdown. You walk down the street and don’t see a soul. In this town, it feels apocalyptic.
I came to New York in July 2019 as an M.D. and a Ph.D. I had just finished a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT in Boston and was starting a pathology residency at Mount Sinai Hospital, one of the largest hospitals in Manhattan. Before the pandemic set in, I was developing new nanotechnology and imaging techniques to help fight against cancer. But since the beginning of March, I’ve been working nonstop with the rest of my colleagues to fight against COVID-19.
“The People Who Develop a Ventilator that Costs $40,000 Are Probably Not the Best People to Go to to Make that Ventilator cost $400”
Ken Gordon – EPAM Continuum – June 25, 2020 – The Resonance Test 49: Dr. Freddy T. Nguyen and Duncan Freake
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a test for innovators. The immense challenges of the situation have called for fast, scalable solutions—and two of the more prominent approaches have come to the fore: open source and crowdsource. In this episode of The Resonance Test, we interrogate some people who’ve played essential roles here. Dr. Freddy T. Nguyen, Co-Director of the MIT COVID-19 Challenge, Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, and a Pathology Resident at Mount Sinai Hospital, has done tremendous work convening teams from across the globe to crowdsource pandemic-related innovation. His conversation partner is EPAM Continuum’s Duncan Freake, a mechanical engineer who is one of the brains behind the GENTL Mask, our open source design that employs readily available materials and a simple manufacturing process to enable localized manufacturing. Our Ken Gordon peppers the duo with questions and gets some really interesting responses, giving us an important look at how partnerships, humility, and especially networks functioned in their pandemic projects. “The value of a network is really investing in good people who have the right spirit and the right motivations,” says Dr. Nguyen—and we think that these words are not just true: They aptly describe both himself and Duncan.
Key Stakeholders Massachusetts and the Netherlands meet again in virtual session
June 23, 2020
Two weeks ago, key stakeholders from Massachusetts and the Netherlands came together in a digital session to discuss how the Life Sciences & Health ecosystems are responding to COVID-19, which lessons could be learned from the reaction to the pandemic, and how to stimulate closer international collaboration.