Outpacing the Virus (new whitepaper)
Hey all you good humans,
Difficult to believe that Pi Day was just three weeks ago, when I wrote about how my goal with the Pi Day video this year was to sneakily get PSA info to people who weren't taking COVID-19 seriously and weren't seeking out information about it.
In the days after Pi Day, the situation in the US changed so quickly that the video soon became obsolete. At this point there is almost no one living in such a bubble that this situation is not affecting them in some way.
In the weeks after Pi Day, I tried to resist digging in on what I thought might be solutions and focus on understanding a bigger picture of the situation and the impact on the future. I ended up trying to understand one area where I was seeing a lot of misinformation and miscommunication, particularly technological responses to the virus.
And so, in a massive collaboration involving a dozen experts in different fields, we wrote an extremely comprehensive and up-to-date whitepaper on contact tracing for COVID-19 and mitigating privacy concerns, and it is very good!
Here is the link to the paper: https://ethics.harvard.edu/outpacing-virus
Here is a Washington Post op-ed that references us: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/03/we-need-tech-government-help-with-contact-tracing-that-doesnt-have-mean-big-brother/
I'm extremely proud of this paper, and of my collaborators. It's been a pleasure to work with such amazing folks jumping in with passion and enthusiasm together on this common goal. I learned so much in the past week.
I hope all of you are staying safe and finding ways to be you in this new world.
Vi
Comments (9)
I'm self-proud and other-proud that 2/6 of my Patreon beneficiaries (clients?) (you and Nicky Case) are working on great things like this paper. For a 3/6 pride level maybe you could tell me that 3Blue1Brown helped with simulations referred to in this paper.
Really great work. Very informative. Thanks, to you and your collaborators.
Thanks for another excellent work! There are a couple of typo/formatting issues in the whitepaper. On the top of page 15, a sentence is repeated twice: "The applications can... and/or GPS". Page 20 repeats two paragraphs there are also on page 19: "Implementation challenges ... the contact tracing/exposure matching technology".
Thanks! The editors and formatter got this out within 24 hours of submission and I've been impressed there's only been a few minor errors like this, I'll let them know.
Nice. Brilliant. Thank you for crafting this and thank you for sharing.
This seems important. Glad WaPo picked it up. Does it depend on the Feds at all? Let's get Gates, Bloomberg, and that other guy off the sidelines. I can bang out some JS. Go, Vi! Go! Can we do another snail video when this is all over?
Oh, I forgot. WaPo does not get it, paywall blocked me from the Op-Ed. ps. How long did this take?! Nice turnaround.
Awesome work Vi! Thank you for doing this, hopefully it'll help save some lives. :)
Thank you for sharing this. It's an interesting look at the various efforts to curb spread, and it also gives me hope that we may be able to get more efficiency out of whatever amount of test kits we'll have available.