Over the next couple of weeks, IUNI plans to highlight some partner projects and affiliates who are contributing important research and resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. We hope this series gives people insight into the contributions researchers are making and helps readers locate important resources they can take advantage of.
IUNI affiliate YY Ahn (IUB Informatics) shared a COVID-19 visualization that has evolved into one of many collaborative, educational tools about the spread of the virus that researchers are taking part in.
Ahn created his interactive visualization with IUB PhD student Sina Kianersi. The tool shows the COVID-19 fatality rate in each country. Ahn invited people to interact with the visualization, which you can do here, as well as contribute to the code, which you can play with here.
A recent version of the visualization Ahn created was based on one created by Aatish Bhatia. Ahn added individual U.S. states and their trajectories to his. You can find Bhatia’s visualization here, which compares COVID-19 trends across countries and shows the drop-off rate of the virus in each one.
Collaborating on research
In the face of a global crisis, scientists like Ahn and Bhatia are coming together to contribute to and build upon each other’s work to create valuable resources.
These digestible visualizations give people a clearer look into the COVID-19 trend. Bhatia paired his with an educational Minute Physics video that explains how to read his graph. The video explains important details about studying trends, such as why the graph plots the average growth rate of confirmed cases over the past week, as opposed updating it with daily confirmed cases. The latter is reported often in the news but doesn’t provide much insight into the true trend of the pandemic.
You can watch it here:
Are you doing work related to COVID-19 and networks at Indiana University? Let us know about it at iuni@indiana.edu – we would love to highlight it here and follow your work.