At Case Western Reserve University, we put our mental muscle into the big issues of our world. I wanted to take a moment to share two examples:
- In April, six members of the CWRU community won the “Hack from Home” global hackathon with the creation of Health Traffic Light, an international risk identification system that has proposed a privacy-preserving technology to identify individual exposure to the virus. The hacking competition brought together 822 participants from 62 countries to deliver projects that can be scaled into solutions to fight COVID-19.
- A team of CWRU professors and their students has created an online risk-assessment tool that combines public information and user data. The mapping tool tracks the risk of contracting the coronavirus in any location, using artificial intelligence and analyzing data from the U.S. Census; state and local health departments; Google traffic maps; social media posts; and a risk perception rating submitted by users. The tool is publicly accessible here.
In these uncertain times, we feel especially grateful and proud of our quick-thinking leaders who have made our community a critical component in the worldwide search for answers.