This summer, students in the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program will begin research with faculty members to aid in the investigation of the risks associated with COVID-19 spread using location-based services data. Professors Yung-Hsiang Lu, David Ebert, David Barbarash, and Wei Zakharov have recently been awarded a National Science Foundation grant through the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. VIP students will continue working on the team throughout the academic year.

VIP Project Description:

The COVID-19 pandemic has more than four million infections and 300,000 deaths as of mid May 2020 worldwide. In response to the pandemic, many governments have imposed “social distancing” policies and restricted “non-essential” activities. As a result, public locations witness significant decreases of crowds. Moreover, many governments recommend wearing masks in public locations. This project uses publicly available visual data to understand the changes in density, usage, and whether people are following recommended guidelines over time.

This project is supported by the National Science Foundation OCA-2027524. The team analyzes only aggregated information and does not recognize any individual for privacy protection. The project follows Purdue Institutional Review Board's protocol 2020-460.

VIP Team page: https://engineering.purdue.edu/VIP/teams/analyze-the-risk-of-covid19-in-crowded-locations

For more details about the research group, please visit: https://www.cam2project.net/

For more details about the grant, please visit: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2027524

About Vertically Integrated Projects:

The Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program provides an opportunity for undergraduate students to earn academic credit while engaging in authentic and extended research and design projects related to active research areas of Purdue faculty members and national, international, and industry-sponsored design challenges. Students can participate on interdisciplinary and vertically-integrated teams (first-year through seniors) with faculty and graduate student mentors for multiple semesters to address these real-world research and design challenges.