Jia Pengyue Won Second Place in COVID-19 Computational Challenge

Undergraduate student Jia Pengyue led the team "Contemporary Li Shizhen" and won the second place of the "2020 COVID-19 Computational Challenge" which was jointly organized by the RMDS Lab (Research Methods and Data Science Lab) and the City of Los Angeles. “This challenge has been a way to bring the best ideas from our global community and to focus on how innovation, data and technology can help us address this global crisis together.” said Jeanne Holm, the City of Los Angeles Chief Data Officer, in an interview. 408 participants from Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America, including high school students, college students and scientists, joined the Challenge.

At the online award ceremony held on zoom, the Deputy Mayor of the City of Los Angeles, Miguel Sangalang, presented the award to the team. The team received $1,000 cash and internship opportunities from the City of Los Angeles, Computational Medicine Department of UCLA and some other partners of the Challenge. The research conducted by the team will be recommended for publication in Harvard Data Science Review and will be showcased at the 2020 Innovative Methods with Data Science & AI Conference (IM Data 2020).

"Contemporary Li Shizhen" is a team composed of undergraduates from Zhejiang University and University of Michigan. Its members include Jia Pengyue, majoring in Geographic Information Science and Wang Yi'an, majoring in Computer Science and Technology both from Zhejiang University; Qian Wanying, majoring in Financial Mathematics and Philosophy, and Qu Ge, majoring in Mathematics and Statistics both from the University of Michigan. 

"Contemporary Li Shizhen" team members

When Jia Pengyue led the team in the discussion of the plan, he combined the reopen policy of Los Angeles with the Chinese government’s experience in fighting against the pandemic. He and the team developed a multi-index evaluation system, proposed to carry out community risk assessment on COVID-19 with health QR code system to instruct the city to reopen and a plan of equal medical care for all.

XinhuaNet reported the Chanllenge and mentioned the team "Contemporary Li Shizhen" in the report. According to report, LA and RMDS's follow-up plan is to deploy the best bits of the winning solutions into one easy-to-use app that will be available to the public free of charge.

"I liked that we had teams from the U.S., China, and all over the world that worked across a lot of international boundaries to really highlight how data can bring us together globally and help us fight this specific pandemic," Holm said during the interview with XinhuaNET.

Jia Pengyue shared his thoughts after winning the prize: "I’d like to thank our mentor associate professor Zhang Feng. During the competition, she gave us a lot of encouragement and support. I’d also like to thank professor Du Zhenhong for helping me lay a solid foundation in multi-index evaluation system and Chen Yurong for patiently answering my questions. As a Chinese student majoring in GIS, it means a lot for me to contribute my knowledge and China’s experience in fighting the pandemic to the global community at such a critical time."

RMDS is known as an international ecosystem service provider that empowers data science professionals and businesses worldwide to achieve successful, data-driven results. The City of Los Angeles, through Jeanne Holm, approached RMDS to help them create and stage the unique challenge.