This content will become publicly available on December 15, 2022

AI-Driven Agent-Based Models to Study the Role of Vaccine Acceptance in Controlling COVID-19 Spread in the US
We study the role of vaccine acceptance in controlling the spread of COVID-19 in the US using AI-driven agent-based models. Our study uses a 288 million node social contact network spanning all 50 US states plus Washington DC, comprised of 3300 counties, with 12.59 billion daily interactions. The highly-resolved agent-based models use realistic information about disease progression, vaccine uptake, production schedules, acceptance trends, prevalence, and social distancing guidelines. Developing a national model at this resolution that is driven by realistic data requires a complex scalable workflow, model calibration, simulation, and analytics components. Our workflow optimizes the total execution time and helps in improving overall human productivity.This work develops a pipeline that can execute US-scale models and associated workflows that typically present significant big data challenges. Our results show that, when compared to faster and accelerating vaccinations, slower vaccination rates due to vaccine hesitancy cause averted infections to drop from 6.7M to 4.5M, and averted total deaths to drop from 39.4K to 28.2K nationwide. This occurs despite the fact that the final vaccine coverage is the same in both scenarios. Improving vaccine acceptance by 10% in all states increases averted infections from 4.5M to 4.7M (a 4.4% improvement) and total deaths more »
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NSF-PAR ID:
10313647
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IEEE International Conference on Big Data
3. Abstract Hard-to-predict bursts of COVID-19 pandemic revealed significance of statistical modeling which would resolve spatio-temporal correlations over geographical areas, for example spread of the infection over a city with census tract granularity. In this manuscript, we provide algorithmic answers to the following two inter-related public health challenges of immense social impact which have not been adequately addressed (1) Inference Challenge assuming that there are N census blocks (nodes) in the city, and given an initial infection at any set of nodes, e.g. any N of possible single node infections, any $$N(N-1)/2$$ N ( N - 1 ) / 2 ofmore »