Dear Friends,

Here’s a quick summary of our activities in response to the global pandemic.

A Corona Virus Briefing with MIT:

On Monday, March 16th, Profs. Sheffi, Pentland and Lo held a live three-hour webinar briefing by MIT on the Cornoa Virus.  The video and slides of this briefing are available here.

New Research Projects:

(1) Building on the inequality project we are building a US-wide map of face-to-face mixing between people, and hence be able to estimate infection risk.   This project, lead by Visiting Professor Esteban Moro, will be able to accurately measure how well social distancing and “shelter in place” policies are working.  We plan to extend to EU soon, and add other measurements as well.

(2) Building and deploying an app for iOS and Android that provides information to volunteer users about their personal risk of infection as they move about. 

New Student Demos:

We have begun asking our graduate students to record brief 5-8 minute demos of their lastest work.  We hope to have one or two of these available per week and offer an opportunity to follow-up with a live webinar with the students to ask questions and provide feedback.

1) Yan Leng “How social influence spreads over networks” [slides]

2) Sandro Lera “Prediction and prevention of disproportionately dominant agents“

3) Tara Sowrirajan “Analysis and control of excessive wealth accumulation”  [slides]

4) Yuan Yuan “An interpretable approach for social network formation among heterogeneous agents“