The NSF Spoke Project ‘Using Big Data for Environmental Sustainability: Big Data + AI Technology = Accessible, Usable, Useful Knowledge’ has repurposed VERA to model the effect of social distancing on the spread of COVID-19, including the SIR model of epidemiology. VERA enables a user to build conceptual models and agent-based simulations, and conduct “what if” virtual experiments.

Read the white paper abstract below:

COVID-19 continues to spread across the country and around the world. Current strategies for managing the spread of COVID-19 include social distancing. We present VERA, an interactive AI tool, that first enables users to specify conceptual models of the impact of social distancing on the
spread of COVID-19. Then, VERA automatically spawns agent-based simulations from the conceptual models, and, given a data set, automatically fills in the values of the simulation parameters
from the data. Next, the user can view the simulation results, and, if needed, revise the simulation parameters and run another experimental trial, or build an alternative conceptual model. We describe
the use VERA to develop a SIR model for the spread of COVID-19 and its relationship with healthcare capacity.

View the project and white paper ‘VERA_Epidemiology – White Paper 1: Using VERA to explain the impact of social distancing on the spread of COVID-19 HERE