• Posted 08-Dec-2020

THE ATHENS UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS ORGANISES RESEARCH WEBINAR: “DEPLOYING A DATA-DRIVEN COVID-19 SCREENING POLICY AT THE GREEK BORDER”

Τhe third lecture of the research webinar of the School of Information Sciences and Technology of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) took place on December 7, 2020. The webinar aimed assessing the details of a nation-wide COVID-19 screening protocol for travelers to Greece designed by the AUEB.

In collaboration with the Greek government, the AUEB designed and deployed a nation-wide COVID-19 screening protocol for travelers to Greece. The goals of the protocol were to combine limited demographic information about arriving travelers with screening results from recently tested travelers to judiciously allocate Greece's limited testing budget to identify asymptomatic, infected travelers and quickly identify hotspots and spikes in other nations to inform immigration/border policies in real-time.

The webinar aims at highlighting the details of the operations of the system (including border screening, database management, closed-loop feedback, and liaising with contact-tracing teams) a novel, batched, contextual bandit algorithm tailored to the unique features of this problem and an empirical assessment of the benefits of the deployed system from the summer/fall 2020, showing that targeted testing based on traveler's features essentially doubles the effectiveness compared to random testing and static grey listing. 

Source: Athens University of Economics and Business News (https://bit.ly/39SLohG)