Using data science to combat COVID-19

Members of the Data Science Research group of Professor Gordon Morison, School of Computing, Engineering and Built Environment recently took part in the Corona Hack. This was a week-long hackathon where multi-disciplinary teams from all over the UK competed to attempted to try and contribute their data skills to help to combat COVID-19 using publicly available data. Details are as follows:

  • The hackathon kicked off on 14 April 2020 and finished with a closing ceremony on 19 April 2020. Due to the lockdown the entire event took place online using Slack and Microsoft Teams.
  • Glasgow Caledonian University was represented in this hackathon by members of Professor Gordon Morison’s interdisciplinary Data Science research team consisting of Dr Imene Mitiche, Alireza Salimy, Mark Waters, Jacob König and Maria Insa-Iglesias, with input on patient testing from Dr Zoë Tieges, School of Health and Life Sciences.
  • They took it upon themselves to develop a solution to aid first diagnosis in hospitals based on chest X-Rays and clinical annotations.
  • During the course of this week, they used their data science and software development skills to develop a prototype visualisation tool which can be combined with AI models to display COVID-19 classification and severity based on X-ray and patient metadata.
  • This team, named Alpaca-COVID-19, worked on this project virtually throughout the week and were awarded the second place by the judges, out of a total of 19 teams. They will receive £1000 toward their future research.

Research at GCU

Research is instrumental in tackling society’s biggest problems. The health, social and economic challenges uncovered by COVID-19 brings into sharp focus our commitment to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure peace and prosperity for all.

Sustainable Development Goals

These global goals reflect our ethos as the University for the Common Good and our mission to make a positive difference to the communities we serve. Read our institutional research strategy to find out more about our commitment to the SDGs during the COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond.

The icons below show which of the 17 SDGs we aim to impact through the research above.