Health Applications Society Online Seminar on June 24 by Professor Vishal Gupta

[INFORMS Health Applications Society Online Seminar Series]

Dear colleagues,

We are excited to announce our next HAS Online Seminar by Dr. Vishal Gupta from USC Marshall School of Business. The details of the seminar are below. Click here to register for the event!

Project Eva: Designing and Deploying the Greek COVID-19 Testing System
Friday, June 24, 1-2pm ET (10-11 am PT)

Abstract: On July 1st, 2020, members of the European Union gradually lifted earlier COVID-19 restrictions on non-essential travel. In response, we designed and deployed “Eva” – a novel reinforcement learning system – across all Greek borders to identify asymptomatic travelers infected with SARS-CoV-2. Eva allocates Greece’s limited testing resources based on demographic characteristics and results from previously tested travelers to (i) limit the influx of new cases and (ii) provide real-time estimates of COVID-19 prevalence to inform border policies. Counterfactual analysis shows that Eva identified 1.85x as many asymptomatic, infected travelers as random surveillance testing, with up to 2-4x as many during peak travel. Moreover, Eva identified approximately 1.25-1.45x as many infected travelers as policies that require similar infrastructure as Eva, but make allocations based on population-level epidemiological metrics (cases/deaths/positivity rates) rather than reinforcement learning. This talk discusses some of the main design decisions behind Eva, the key elements of the reinforcement learning algorithm, and the measured impact of the system in the summer of 2020.  

Bio: Vishal Gupta is an Associate Professor of Data Sciences and Operations at the USC Marshall School of Business. He complete his Ph.D. in Operations Research at MIT in 2014. Vishal’s research focuses on data-driven decision-making and optimization, particularly in settings where data are scarce. Such settings are common in applications that rely on personalization (like precision healthcare) and real-time decision-making (like risk management). Consequently, his research spans a wide variety of areas including revenue management, education, healthcare, and artificial intelligence. Vishal has received a number of recognitions for his work, including the Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research, the Pierskalla Best Paper Prize, the Jagdish Sheth Impact of Research on Practice Award.

We are also honored to have more extraordinary speakers lined up for the upcoming seminars in the following months. Please block the same time slot 1-2pm ET (10-11am PT) on 4th Friday of July-September on your calendar for:

• July 22, Professor Carri Chan, Columbia Business School
  
• (August: Details coming soon!)
• September 23, Professor Stefan Scholtes, University of Cambridge

We would like to thank everyone who attended previous seminars! If you couldn't make it before, now you can view the recordings following the links archived in the "Past Seminars" Section of our HAS seminar webpage. If you have any questions, let us know at hassemin...@gmail.com.

Feel free to share it with anyone who could be interested among your colleagues and student groups.

Looking forward to seeing you there and then!

Best regards,

HAS Online Seminar Organization Team
Sanjay Mehrotra (Northwestern)
Sait Tunc (Virginia Tech)

Qiushi Chen (Penn State)