This article originally appeared in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering newsroom:
Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering Distinguished Professor Geoffrey Fox and Associate Professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering Judy Qiu are part of a collaboration of researchers who have been awarded an Expeditions in Computing award from the National Science Foundation.
The Global Pervasive Computational Epidemiology project is led by researchers from the University of Virginia and conducted in conjunction with IU, Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, Virginia Tech, University of Maryland, Yale University, Stanford University, and the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy. With infectious diseases causing more than 13 million deaths per year worldwide, rapid growth in human population and its ability to adapt to a variety of environmental conditions has resulted in unprecedented levels of interaction between humans and other species. This rise in interaction combined with emerging trends in globalization, anti-microbial resistance, urbanization, climate change, and ecological pressures increased the risk of a global pandemic, such as the current COVID-19 crisis.
The project’s multidisciplinary team is working together to capture the complexities underlying infectious diseases while revolutionizing real-time epidemiology. Fox and Qiu are providing high-performance computing and cyberinfrastructure support for high-performance parallel computations in both simulations and data analytics.
“I’m proud to be part of a team working at the Expeditions in Computing,” Qiu said. “The motivation to protect people’s health and lives will continue over the long-haul, well beyond coronavirus and well beyond the decade.”
