In the early days of the pandemic, when the big Covid-19 dashboards were filled with graphs and upward sloping lines, the impression was that we had the data under control. Numbers were being tracked, plotted, and forecast. But that wasn’t…
At the onset of lockdown, the assumption for a lot of people was that connection was going to hit pause. No more nights out, no watercooler chatter at work, no grabbing a coffee with someone on the fly. Instead, something…
COVID-19 brought two kinds of crises into sharp relief. The first was clearly medical, a deadly virus that was overwhelming hospitals and filling up news headlines. The second was less dramatic but no less impactful, a sense of disconnection and…
The COVID-19 pandemic tested healthcare systems, governments, and people around the world, but it also tested data science and AI. Visualization dashboards proliferated, the number of cases updated hourly, and predictive models abounded. Everyone wondered if the models could predict…
COVID-19 brought a lot of technologies to the forefront, but AI was perhaps the most obvious example of technology that went from “cool, but” to “this is actually pretty useful right now.” AI was used for everything from contact tracing…
Before we dive in, a quick word on what COVID did beyond the immediate medical response. Beyond the news stories about infection rates and ICU capacity, COVID-19 altered the fabric of our daily lives, how we communicate, date, work, and…