AIM/MCRN Summer School on COVID-19: Week 6
By Hans Kaper
Last week was the final week of the summer school on “Dynamics and Data in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” organized by the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) and the Mathematics and Climate Research Network (MCRN). The pressure was on: presentations were scheduled for Thursday afternoon, and final reports from each umbrella’s subgroups were due on Friday at 1 p.m.
Presentations
Most of the beginning of the week was devoted to group discussions and presentation preparations. Teams were given 45 minutes for their presentations, including a short break and a question-and-answer period.
On Wednesday, several groups held dry runs with their leaders. Steve Schecter (North Carolina State University) and I had worked with two subgroups under the “Impact of Human Behavior” umbrella, so I was treated to a preview of these talks. The first group implemented a susceptible-infectious-susceptible (SIS) model on an adaptive network, and the second presentation addressed an existing model proposed by Piero Poletti, Bruno Caprile, Marco Ajelli, Andrea Pugliese, and Stefano Merler that incorporates game-theoretic concepts, including an assessment of the cost of switching from “normal” to “adjusted” behavior in a susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered (SEIR) model. Both groups had prepared impressive shows that required only minor adjustments.
The participants gave their presentations on Thursday afternoon in five parallel sessions. The audience for each session consisted of three leaders and/or mentors each of whom heard five presentations by groups with which they did not work. Some of the experts also listened in during presentations of their choice. I heard presentations on diseases and the environment (Umbrella group: "Climate"), age-structured multi-population models (Umbrella group: "Social Justice"), and pop-up testing (Umbrella group: "Resource Allocation"). They were all well-prepared and informative, with potential for further research.
Final Reports
Friday morning was crunch time, and students worked to submit their reports by the 1 p.m. deadline. These reports had to be written in LaTeX and could contain no more than three pages of text with an additional two pages for figures and references. Chris Jones (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) had prepared an Overleaf template to guide the process and facilitate the transfer of information to the final report, which will be submitted to AIM.
Visitors
During the Friday morning session, we also entertained several visitors. Estelle Basor provided an overview of the research opportunities offered by AIM, the NSF-supported mathematics research institute that funded the summer school. Juan Meza, division director of the NSF’s Division of Mathematical Sciences, also paid a virtual visit to the summer school at the invitation of AIM executive director Brian Conrey. He received a tour of the Sococo workspace and met with a group of students.
Diversity
Chris had prepared a discussion on diversity, which included several interactive polls. He demonstrated the danger of linear thinking with regard to intellectual curiosity, creativity, and other factors that affect researchers’ approaches to diversity in practice.
Future Plans
Participants spent Friday afternoon in groups again, mostly to discuss future plans. Since our Sococo space will remain live after the summer school, we can continue to interact on this platform. Mary Lou Zeeman (Bowdoin College) proposed that everyone meet for tea on Wednesday afternoons from 4-4:30 p.m. Finally, Chris orchestrated a musical farewell that concluded the six-week summer school.
Hans Kaper, founding chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Mathematics of Planet Earth and editor-in-chief of SIAM News, is affiliate faculty in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Georgetown University.