i-sense: LCN Student Award for "Outstanding Contributions to the Community"
Many of our i-sense team members have received awards or fellowships over the past year - let’s take a closer look at a few of our award updates.
Public engagement is an important part of our research at i-sense, in order to disseminate our findings with a wide, diverse and inclusive audience and also to develop our network and engage future researchers into the field. Let’s take a closer look at some of the varied areas of public engagement that we have been involved in over the past few months.
Researchers within i-sense have developed a new public health data visualisation dashboard for COVID-19. Developing the dashboard has highlighted issues regarding the quality, consistency and availability of reliable data needed to manage the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts.
UCL has launched Virus Watch, inviting 50,000 households to take part in one of the largest and most comprehensive studies of COVID-19 in the UK.
The study, which will require participants to complete regular online symptom surveys, seeks to better understand community spread of the virus.
Pandemics, such as COVID-19, are usually assumed to spread rapidly within the population. In reality, the population is more heterogeneous with regard to risk, and there will be large variation on the basis of geography, workplace and other key factors.
Analysing data on a national level therefore risks hiding this heterogeneity and compromises the most effective public health response. New analysis from i-sense researchers at University College London suggests COVID-19 has such diverse effects on the different local authorities in the UK.
i-sense researchers from University College London, led by Dr Vasileios Lampos, in collaboration with Public Health England, Microsoft Research, and Harvard Medical School are looking at ways of tracking COVID-19 using online search data to better understand the true extent of community spread.
Their current analysis, which uses machine learning models to make predictions of potential prevalence of COVID-19 in a population, focuses on a number of countries, including the United Kingdom, United States of America, Canada, Australia, France, and Italy.
New research from i-sense members at UCL, in collaboration with the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI), looks at ways data visualisation can help population surveillance sites better utilise and understand the large amounts of data they collect for disease surveillance.
i-sense researchers from UCL and Imperial College London joined this month’s superbugs themed Science Museum Lates. The exhibit, titled ‘The Ultimate Superbugs Race,’ was a collaboration between i-sense and students from the UCL Institute of Archaeology.
Researchers from i-sense joined the award winning show, New Scientist Live, as thousands of people visited the ExCel centre in London for a stimulating festival of ideas.
This year marked the second year of the show, which featured five themed zones, including cosmos, earth, humans, technology and engineering.
