Today, many people and institutions are helping to fight the Covid-19 epidemic. The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, is collaborating with researchers, other institutions and companies to provide solutions for all.
Today, many people and institutions are helping to fight the Covid-19 epidemic. The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, is collaborating with researchers, other institutions and companies to provide solutions for all. Specifically, the UPC is involved and has promoted 20 projects that have been managed through the Cooperation Center for Development (CCD). The university wants to respond to the global challenge to fight COVID-19, both in the field of international cooperation, to help people living in less-favored countries, and in the in the field of innovating with projects of technology in order to generate a positive impact on those social needs that have arisen from the pandemic, especially in the most vulnerable groups.
Among the projects that are proposed, some are projects to create tools that facilitate access to education, tools to support decision-making, other projects seek to produce low-cost lung respirators, technologies for the analysis of current needs, etc. A summary of all projects can be found in the following link.
One of the projects is being developed by us, inLab FIB named SDL-PAND (Pandemic simulation to test the effectiveness of containment strategies through Cellular Automata and Intelligent Agents using formal languages) together with the Cooperation Center for Developemente of the UPC.
The project tries to make a functional prototype that allows to evaluate alternatives of containment of the pandemic, based on a graphical conceptualization of the models, that present / display the modeling hypotheses. The system will expand to feed on two fundamental sources which are the data of the evolution of the pandemic, which show past data and, data from sensors and mobile phones that show a vision of the situation in the present, which will define models to predict the spread of the pandemic based on citizen behavior. The model can also be expanded to include traffic management, evacuation, etc. models.
The aim of the project is both to generate a web application to analyze alternatives, and to define a working methodology that allows to establish a common framework for the different specialists who must collaborate in the definition of complex models, understand the hypotheses of the models and, from from these, understand the causality that derives. The validation of the proposal and the resulting tool will be the responsibility of th Institut Català d’Oncologia and a team from the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona.
You can read about this project in this link.