Demo Abstract: Implementing a COVID-19 Risk Assessment System for User-Informed Travel Planning in Harris County

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced people worldwide to modify their daily activities, including travel plans. To help individuals make informed decisions about visiting public places, Cheng [2] first proposed a real-time COVID-19 risk assessment system called RT-CIRAM and implemented prototypes for two U.S. metropolitan locations. The system calculates a COVID-19 risk score and categorizes the risk levels into high, medium, and low, recommends the safe travel destination using the users' location and the specified distance the user is willing to travel, thereby helping users make informed decisions about their travel plans. © 2023 ACM.

Real-Time COVID-19 Infection Risk Assessment and Mitigation based on Public-Domain Data

A number of models have been developed to predict the spreads of the COVID-19 pandemic and how non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as social distancing, facial coverings, and business and school closures can contain this pandemic. Evolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) approaches have recently been proposed to automatically determine the most effective interventions by generating a large number of candidate strategies customized for different countries and locales and evaluating them with predictive models. These epidemiological models and advanced AI techniques assist policy makers by providing them with strategies in balancing the need to contain the pandemic and the need to minimize their economic impact as well as educating the general public about ways to reduce the chance of infection. However, they do not advise an individual citizen at a specific moment and location on taking the best course of actions to accomplish a task such as grocery shopping while minimizing infection.Therefore, this paper describes a new project aiming to develop a mobile-phone-deployable, real-time COVID-19 infection risk assessment and mitigation (RT-CIRAM) system which analyzes up-to-date data from multiple open sources leveraging urgent HPC/cloud computing, coupled with time-critical scheduling and routing techniques. Implementation of a RT-CIRAM prototype is underway, and it will be made available to the public. Facing the increasing spread of the more contagious Delta (B.1.617.2) and Delta Plus (AY.4.2) variants, this personal system will be especially useful for individual citizen to reduce her/his infection risk despite increasing vaccination rates while contributing to containing the spread of the current and future pandemics. © 2021 IEEE.