Awesome

Welcome to defeatcovid19 Group

Our goal is to help doctors and people, share knowledge across cities and countries to finally #defeatcovid19

The aim of this project is to join togheter all the contribution that people around the world can offer to help everyone to overcome the devastating outbreak of COVID19.

Read also the onboarding message of Luca, one of the founders of the group.

Contents

• The reason why we started this project
• Who can partecipate
• Contributors
• Working tracks
• Onboarding data
• Tools
• Results

Why did we create this group?

Basically our idea is to share as much as possible, helping people all around the world to help in this fight. The group is (and will forever be) non-profit and inclusive to anyone willing to contribute or that can take benefits from our results.

Read the full story about how we came to this idea.

Who can partecipate?

Short answer: everyone.

Long answer: we're looking to have all the people willing to help on board. This battle is a marathon and we will have to stay on track for the next months, even when the emergency reduces somewhere to outbreak in other countries. Having the widest number of participants, each one with her/his own specific contribution can be a game changer in this fight.

We outlined a number of ways how different professionals could help, but this list is not exhaustive and can be improved. If you feel we're missing someone, please stand up and reach out!

Contributors and partners

Since March 16th, when we published defeatcovid19 website, a number of companies, professionals and people joined our mission.

We started as an open initiative promoted by Neosperience, PoliMi, Looptribe and ValueChina. Now we have more than 250 participants from the industrial, research and non profit world. Even companies offered support and technology.

We will publish a partners (coming soon) section both here and on our website. If your company is supporting this project and wants to be listed, please reach out to us.

Working Tracks

There are many path we could follow in this figth to #defeatcovid19. Unfortunately the group cannot address all of them beceause every track needs someone efforts and sharing knowledge. We're looking actively to onboard new coordinators for the tracks that aren't actve yet.

Currently we exploited:

• AI applications in Medical Imaging
• Statistical outbreak data analysis (coordinator required)
• Clinical data correlation to detect risk factors (coordinator required)
• Drug impact analysis and simulation (coordinator required)
• Using Maker tools to build equipment (coordinator required)

Onboarding data

Currently we're reaching out to a number of hospitals to obtain the data needed to support our group efforts.

Here there is an updated list of contacted hospitals and the status of every attempt.

Anyone that can push to speed up things or contact new hospitals, is heavily encouraged to do so and reach out directly to the Support Team.

If a legal representative is required to sign request forms, we have a number of companies that are available to do this.

You can custimize the following document templates to be sent out to hospitals and other potential partners:

• Project description (in English)
• Project description (in Italian)
• Presentation letter to the ethic committee of Italian hospitals (in Italian)

Tools

We discussed a lot about which tools were better than others to support our efforts (disclaimer: many of us are engineers, so we love discussing about tools).

We tried to find a balance between supporting the discussion and not wasting contributes and efforts across a number of different tools. Actually we are guided to the search of a balance between the right tool for the right job and having someone supporting people in this tools.

The best mix we found so far is:

• defeatcovid19.org website acting as a collector and institutional reference to promote the project. Every new participant is encouraged to sign up through the website to be added to the group
• Telegram group to support the discussion about how we could improve our efforts and the latest results
• Github organization that is going to store all the project stuff, and many relted repositories. Now we have:
  • defeatcovid19 project containing all the references and information about the project. It should be considered the landing path for newcomers.
  • awesome defeatcovid19 resources containing a reference to the relevant information we fuound online
  • A model trained on public data containing our first trained model (~0.8 ROC AUC score)

Other tools such as Discord/Slack or Trello are great to be involved into the process, but we will adopt them according to our capacity and the needs of the group.

Group outcomes

All the results obtained by defeatcovid19 group are intended to be released free and open source to everyone. We are going to selct the most suitable license (Apache2, MIT, Common Creative) depending on the content.

Sharing knowledge with ease is a mandatory pillar for this group and every participant is asked to accept and support it.

Code of conduct

Please be nice. It's never the time to be rude, unpolite or non inclusive with people. Try to cope with stress and respond using compassion instead of hate.

For a detailed review about the behavior we expect in this group, please read our code of conduct