Kimon Drakopoulos

May 5, 2021, at 4 PM 

Online (Zoom)

 

Abstract

 

In collaboration with the Greek government, we 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 i) judiciously allocate Greece’s limited testing budget to identify asymptomatic, infected travelers and ii) quickly identify hotspots and spikes in other nations to inform immigration/border policies in real-time. This talk details i) the operations of our designed system (including border screening, database management, closed-loop feedback, and liaising with contact-tracing teams), ii) a novel, batched, contextual bandit algorithm tailored to the unique features of this problem and iii) an empirical assessment of the benefits of the deployed system from the summer/fall 2020.

Prof Kimon Drakopoulos
(University of Southern California)


Kimon Drakopoulos is an Assistant Professor of Data Sciences and Operations at USC Marshall School of Business, where he researches complex networked systems, control of contagion, information design and information economics. He completed his Ph.D. in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT, focusing on the analysis and control of epidemics within networks. His current research revolves around controlling contagion, epidemic or informational as well as the use of information as a lever to improve operational outcomes in the context of testing allocation, fake news propagation and belief polarization.

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