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Message from IEEE Greece Section on COVID-19
Dear colleagues – members of the IEEE Greece section,
I hope that you and your beloved ones are doing well amidst this unprecedented global health crisis.
IEEE is closely monitoring the updates concerning the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak and would like to shine a light on its very own IEEE members who are on the “front line”, developing tools and technologies to address this pandemic, and future ones.
If you would like to share such news with us, please email us back at knikita@ece.ntua.gr a short description of the activities you are involved in, so that we can contribute in IEEE’s effort towards collecting such information and creating a relevant “central repository” which IEEE members will be able to access via the Institute’s website.
Take care. Stay safe.
Konstantina Nikita, IEEE Greece Section Chair
If you would like to share more news regarding your activities against the COVID-19 pandemic with us, please email us back at knikita@ece.ntua.gr a short description of such activities.
1. The Intelligent Data Exploration and Analysis Laboratory (IDEAL) of the University of the Aegean has utilized its expertise on the areas of machine learning, data mining and natural language processing in order to develop tools that address a list of initial key scientific questions that are drawn from the NASEM’s SCIED (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats) research topics and the World Health Organization’s R&D Blueprint for COVID-19 using the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), which is a resource of over 44,000 scholarly articles, including over 29,000 with full text, about COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and related coronaviruses. The questions addressed include:
a. What is known about transmission, incubation, and environmental stability?
b. What do we know about COVID-19 risk factors?
c. What do we know about virus genetics, origin, and evolution?
d. What do we know about vaccines and therapeutics?
e. What do we know about non-pharmaceutical interventions?
f. What do we know about diagnostics and surveillance?
g. What has been published about medical care?
h. What has been published about ethical and social science considerations?
i. What has been published about information sharing and inter-sectoral collaboration?
2. The BEYOND Center of Excellence, which develops research and provides disaster management services addressing priorities and needs in South Eastern Europe, Mediterranean, N. Africa, Middle East and the Balkans, published the new edition of WEB GIS COVID-19 platform for continuous monitoring of COVID-19 global spread. The data analysed by the platform are collected from four independent sources: (i) European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), (ii) John Hopkins University, (iii) World Health Organisation (WHO), and (iv) trustworthy news agencies. Plots regarding confirmed cases by country, deaths by country, country participation rate to the number of cases worldwide, and death rate by country are updated daily for nine countries (China, USA, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, UK and Germany). Such analysis may help decoding possible relations among social, economic, geographic and natural environment parameters and the pandemic.