Personal Risk Assessment Web App. Testing Begins!
COVID-19 continues
to affect countries around the world, and while the accelerating
distribution of vaccines
is much welcomed news, it will be many months before enough people
are vaccinated to achieve herd immunity
and new COVID-19 variants present a continuing threat. In the
meantime, we still need a data-driven, scientifically-sound way to
quantify the risks of infection and reduce its spread.
This is why we are
so excited to announce the launching of our Pandemonium Personal
Risk Assessment app for testing! We are starting off with a very
limited feature set, which will be gradually expanded on a rolling
basis. We hope to use the first phase testing to receive user
feedback, resolve issues promptly and make improvements before we
scale it up further.
Separately, we are
raising funds in order to be able to take this further.
We
hope to count on your generosity to help us scale up. We
also need more volunteers with various skills, including
non-technical, like legal, marketing, etc., as well as access to more
data.
We welcome those
interested in helping with our first phase testing to sign
up at testing@pandemonium.dev. Those who wish to
answer our call for donation can do so through our website at
https://pandemonium.dev/.
This is a critical
time in the pandemic and our risk assessment tool will complement the
vaccines by assisting the public in mitigating their risks through
better, more nuanced, quantitative understanding.
Our app will be particularly useful not just through potential
spikes,
but also as COVID-19 abates. It is not going to happen all at once,
so it is not going to be easy for people to figure out on their own
when it is safe enough to do certain things they may have held off
doing.
While the app
appears very simple to the user, it has a sophisticated Stochastic
Heterogeneous Hybrid Spatially-Hierarchical/Dynamic and
Demographically-structured Regional
Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered-Dead (SEIRD) Compartmental
model built on the Pyro Probabilistic Programming Language (PPL),
using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and other statistical inference
techniques.
We sincerely hope
that you can share your comments and suggestions with us.
This effort is being led by Quantum Risk Analytics, Inc., recently founded by MIT alumni, and has project member contributors from around the world.
We are developing a free, powerful web tool that is highly informative and can be used by anyone.
Key differences from many other models:
Personalized Risk Assessment - Anyone can see their own COVID-19 risk estimate!
Higher degree of localization - to project the impact on local communities.
Interconnected localities - to better model virus transport between communities.
Stochastic - to more accurately model, especially for locations with smaller case counts and populations. (Deterministic solutions to the ordinary differential equations of a compartmentalized model are only appropriate in the thermodynamic limit.)
Extensible & Flexible - allowing more detailed data & models to be added where available.
More Usable & Controllable - A powerful, useful tool even for non-epidemiologists!
More about this project can be found in this working draft proposal.
Check back soon.... This site will be updated further.
Help Wanted!
If you can contribute to this project in any way, please contact us! This is an all-volunteer effort so far. Our need for volunteers extends beyond the specific positions we have listed.
Questions? E-mail us.
