Jeannette Wing Receives NSF Grant to Create COVID-19 Information Commons

Jeannette Wing, Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute at Columbia University, has received a $200,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to create a COVID Information Commons (CIC) website to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration across various COVID research efforts, beginning with NSF-funded COVID Rapid Response Research (RAPID) projects.

CIC will serve as a resource for researchers and decision-makers from government, academia, nonprofits, and industry to leverage each other’s findings and accelerate the most promising research to mitigate the broad societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. It will also be a model for integrated knowledge sharing and collaboration on other public health challenges.

Projects will be able to enter and publish information about their efforts in ways that are most relevant and user-friendly for a variety of potential stakeholders. CIC will semantically link information to provide a more holistic view across distinct efforts. The resulting, concise, curated, integrated resource will provide insight into NSF-funded COVID RAPID projects, coronavirus-related NSF Open Knowledge Network projects, and other NSF research projects and facilitate collaborations among such efforts.

This effort will be led by the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub in collaboration with hubs in the Midwest, South, and West.

The award is made by the Convergence Accelerator program in the Office of Integrative Activities with funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Click here to learn more about the project.

— Robert Florida, Data Science Institute