Data Analytics
Presenter(s): Matt Raymond, Tristan Chilvers
Advisor(s): Dr. Michael Fahy
The purpose of our research project is to show that technology, when paired with the right data, can be a powerful, egalitarian tool. We constantly hear how data collection can negatively impact society, but we wanted to use this as an opportunity to show how it can potentially save lives. By leveraging data from local/federal governments, GPS/IP locations, and free services provided by Google and others, we hope to be able to create a mobile website that can help users avoid COVID-19 epicenters. Ideally, the user would be able to search a given radius for a given type of business, and receive the results with dangerous locations removed. To allow this tool to work in extremely-dangerous locations (such as New York City), there would be a setting that would allow the user to choose how dangerous they were willing to be. Even though this may send the user into a dangerous location, the user is fully aware of the risk that they’d be taking on, and would be better able to prepare. If fully realized, and provided with enough data, it could potentially help reduce the rate of infection, as well as save the lives of immunocompromised individuals. Governments around the world are taking drastic administrative action to combat the virus, and organizations like Johns Hopkins are creating datasets and tools for researchers. Some of this is making it to the public in the form of interactive maps, but far too little is being done to put this data in an actionable format that the public can use to make an immediate difference. That’s exactly what our project aims to accomplish.