Last weekend, from April 3 to April 5, Versus Virus an online-hackathon took place to address challenges imposed on Switzerland and its inhabitants by the ongoing crisis caused by Covid-19. Over the course of 48 hours, more than 4600 people contributed to solutions in 263 teams. Among the participants were also two members of DDIS, Rosni Kottekulam Vasu and Florian Ruosch. Independently, they both worked on their respective team’s projects.
Crowds vs Covid
Rosni was part of a team that tackled the challenge that the global research community is overwhelmed with the resources of over 47,000 scholarly articles related to COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and related coronavirus. The overloading for scientific and lay people about COVID-19 makes it very difficult to select the right information at the right time. In this context, they developed a pipeline, which can take high volumes of information (either scientific publications or social media), filter it by first feeding it through machine learning algorithms, and then use crowdsourcing to further refine the selection and tagging. This information can then be used to inform policy makers or subject experts in a timely manner.
You can find more information about the project at the following locations:
- Team Web-site: https://devpost.com/software/crowdvscovid
- Short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu8UV-1hixU
- Prototype System: https://lab.citizenscience.ch/en/
KurzarbeitGoesDigital
Florian helped developing a platform to digitalize, simplify, and accelerate the application process for short-time work (Kurzarbeit). Employers can digitally file the application according to official governmental and cantonal guidelines. The digitalized solution may be used swiss-wide and considers cantonal differences. Furthermore, it allows to make real-time analyses based on filed applications per canton or aggregated for the whole country and visualize the results. This project even made it into the set of highlights in the category “Economic Impact”.
You can find more information about the project at the following locations:
- Team Web-site: https://www.versusvirus.ch/blog/kurzarbeitgoesdigital?categoryId=150018
- Short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu8UV-1hixU
- Prototype System: http://kurzarbeitportal.mhc.li
Update
Our very own Florian was interviewed by CNN Money Switzerland. The piece aired on April 7 and can be found here: https://www.cnnmoney.ch/shows/big-picture/videos/highlights-versus-virus-hackathon