The Data Science against COVID19 Team obtains €300 thousand in competitive funding from CRUE and FBBVA

The Data Science against COVID19 Team, led by Dr. Nuria Oliver, Chief Scientific Advisor at the newly created ELLIS Unit of Alicante, has received competitive funding for her work leading the Data Science against COVID-19 team as Commissioner for the President of the Valencian Government in Spain on AI and Data Science against COVID-19.

The team is formed by a multidisciplinary group of volunteers who collaborate in the analysis of data to assist in the fight against COVID-19. It has been selected to obtain funding of €300,000 in two recent competitive research initiatives.

The first is the Super COVID-19 Fund organized by CRUE Spanish Universities, the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and Banco Santander.[1] The call has given a total of EUR 8.5 million to support collaborative projects that address the health and educational challenges arising from the health crisis. The proposal made by the team, called CD4COVID, was one of the selected proposals and received funding of 150,000 euros.

The second is an aid to scientific research teams working on SARS-CoV-2/ COVID-19 organized by the BBVA Foundation,in the category of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. The team’s proposal, called IA4COVID19,[2] has been awarded 149,037 euros in an extremely competitive selection process in which 150 proposals were submitted, of which only 4 were selected.

The Data Sciences team in the fight against COVID-19 is a multidisciplinary team of volunteers working closely with the Directorate-General for Analysis and Public Policies of the Presidency, from where the analysis for COVID-19 is coordinated with the Ministry of Health and the rest of Ministries involved.

The team works in four priority areas with their respective coordinators: (1) mobility data analysis, visualization and modeling, (2) computational epidemiological models and (3) predictive models and (4) citizen science in the fight against COVID-19 through a large-scale citizen survey with more than 300,000 responses: https://covid19impactsurvey.org

The group is led by Dr. Nuria Oliver, who in addition to being Commissioner to the President of the Valencian Government on AI Strategy and Data Science against COVID-19, is co-founder and Chief Scientific Advisor in ELLIS Alicante. Experts from the Universitat Jaume I, University of Valencia, Politechnic University of Valencia, University Miguel Hernández, University of Alicante, University CEU Cardenal Herrera, Fisabio and Microsoft are part of the team, in collaboration with Esri, the Spanish National Office of Statistics, the SESDIA and the three most important mobile phone operators in the country.

[1] https://www.crue.org/proyecto/fondo-supera-covid-19/

[2] https://www.fbbva.es/equipo/ciencias-datos-lucha-contra-covid19/