Two research groups from the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences won the "Challenge on Mobility Intervention for Epidemics" in the workshop of Prescriptive Analytics for the Physical World (PAPW) of KDD, the world’s highest-level academic conference in the field of data mining and knowledge discovery, which was held from August 23 to 27, 2020.  

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) disease has become a pandemic in a global scale. Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing and other digital technologies have played an important role in epidemic surveillance and analysis, virus traceability, prevention and control, resource allocation and other aspects. Confronted with this situation, on the one hand, a series of personnel isolation strategies adopted by various countries around the world such as "social distancing", "home quarantine" and "health code", are considered to be effective in containing the epidemic; on the other hand, isolation strategies also affect people's daily life and the economic activities of various countries.  

How to design isolation strategies that can not only guarantee people's normal life, but also suppress the spread of the epidemic has become a main issue that global researchers pay attention to. 

Generally, the goal of the challenge was to minimize the total number of infected people and minimize the intervention on human mobility at the same time. The simulator used in the competition simulates individual mobility in a city with 10k people for 60 days. It employed the susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) model for the spread of disease and runs the individual-level epidemic simulation according to the intervention strategy. There were several levels of mobility intervention, and 5 scenarios were provided in the official competition. The final ranking was based on the sum of rankings over all 5 scenarios. 

More than 20 teams from all over the world participated in the competition. In the end, one team jointly formed by SIAT and JingDong Co., Ltd won the championship, while another team from SIAT won the first runner-up. Both results submitted by these two teams lead top 2 in all competition scenarios. 

The SIAT members of the winning teams were mainly from the Algorithm Optimization Group of the Research Center for High Performance Computing Technology, was led by Prof. ZHANG Yong and Dr. NING Li, who was also the instructor of the participating teams. They are focusing on approximation and online algorithms, distributed computing, and multiagent systems. 

The challenge is co-hosted by Penn State University, Tsinghua University, University of Southern California, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and Virginia Tech.

Certificate for Challenge on Mobility Intervention for Epidemics. (Image by SIAT) 

Media Contact:
ZHANG Xiaomin
Email: xm.zhang@siat.ac.cn