Professor Aravind Srinivasan receives part of a $10M NSF Expeditions Grant in Computational Epidemiology for Multi-Institutional Research on Global Pervasive Computational Epidemiology

A team of researchers led by Professor Aravind Srinivasan at UMD and by the University of Virginia overall, secured the prestigious NSF Expeditions in Computing award on the timely topic of Computational Epidemiology. The other UMD faculty involved are Distinguished University Professor Rita R. Colwell and Assistant Professor Abhinav Bhatele (CS and UMIACS).  

The growth and the adaptability of the human population in addition to the globalization, antimicrobial resistance, urbanization, climate change, and ecological pressures has increased the risk of a global pandemic. Srinivasan’s project aims to develop transformative and scalable computing and data science technologies to address fundamental problems in real-time epidemic science.

“The tools developed by this interdisciplinary project will provide new capabilities to decision-makers as well as result in improved science-based decision-making for epidemic planning & response, will add to many facets of epidemiology, and will also be applicable to other areas including cybersecurity, ecology, and the social sciences”, said Srinivasan.

The project will lead to the development of a rigorous computational theory of spreading and control processes on dynamic multi-scale, multi-layer (MSML) networks, along with tools from AI, machine learning, and the social sciences -- providing novel insights to control epidemics.

The awarded research focuses on developing pervasive computing technologies and cyber-environments to support disease surveillance and real-time response.

“The project will take into account several multi-disciplinary goals. These include preserving the privacy of individuals and of vulnerable groups, developing accurate models in an efficient manner, making these model predictions interpretable and explainable, developing effective interventions even under uncertain-data regimes, model-building for different types of societal structures & demographics, understanding the strategic and/or adversarial behaviors of individual agents in a network, and ensuring fairness of the process across the whole  population”, explained Srinivasan.

This multi-institutional project includes multi discipline researchers from Arizona State University, Georgia Tech, Indiana University, Jackson State University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of Maryland, University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Yale University and the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy.

In addition to research activities, the team plans to deliver a comprehensive student-training program at multiple levels to foster interest and increase understanding of computational science in addressing the complex societal challenges due to pandemics, as well as to work together with local, regional, national, and international public health agencies.

The awarded project targets to establish a center for Computational Research in Epidemiology (CoRE) at the University of Virginia in order to develop transformative ways to support real-time epidemiology and facilitate improved outbreak response to benefit the society.

In addition to being a Professor of Computer Science, Srinivasan holds a joint appointment in UMIACS. 

More details about the awarded project:

https://computational-epidemiology.org/ 

News release from the NSF: 

https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/announcements/032420.jsp

More about the NSF Expeditions in Computing Awards: 

https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503169

More about Srinivasan’s research:

https://www.cs.umd.edu/~srin/