Reich Lab Blog

Five College DataFest recap: tips for next year

by Nick

Posted on 04 April, 2016

Another Five College ASA DataFest has long come and gone, and I’ve been meaning to write a recap for a while. Now in its third year in the Pioneer Valley in Western Massachusetts, the number of registrants doubled from last year, from 70 to 140. All Five Colleges (Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, and UMass-Amherst) sent multiple teams, and there were a few teams with a mix of students from different schools.

Team “Beta than U” from UMass-Amherst took home one of the Best in Group awards. From left to right: Laura Bowles, Vincent Lee, Harley Jean, Bianca Agustin, and Stephanie Crowley.

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Evidence for Ebola active monitoring policies

by Nick

Posted on 03 December, 2015

Sheri Fink published this nice piece in the New York Times yesterday on the legal issues surrounding state-imposed quarantines on travelers returning from countries with widespread Ebola transmission. In addition to the toll these policies have had on the individuals who have been put under quarantine, I took away from this article that there is still a need for better data on and communication about the risks of travelers being infected with Ebola. As it happens, this is the topic of my talk today at the Epidemics5 conference.

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ASTMH 2015 Presentation: Real-time prediction of dengue fever in Thailand

by Steve

Posted on 17 November, 2015

Last week, I had the honor of presenting at the 64th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene (ASTMH) in the well-attended Dengue: Epidemiology session. This presentation covers our work with the Thai Ministry of Public Health and Johns Hopkins University in building an infrastructure for making real-time dengue hemorrhagic fever case predictions and evaluating the performance of our predictions thus far.

You can find the slides for the presentation here. After the jump, I’ll provide a slide-by-slide summary. To view the paper associated with this work, you can check it out on arXiv.

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Strange bedfellows: methods for predicting the NBA and flu

by Nick

Posted on 12 October, 2015

FiveThirtyEight’s new CARMELO prediction alorithm, that projects the future careers of every NBA player, has similarity with prediction methods in other fields.

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Contributing to STAN

by Nick

Posted on 10 September, 2015

In a feat of focused coding jujitsu, Krzysztof successfully put together a pull-request to the base development version of STAN.

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This blog was launched in the summer of 2015. We occasionally post news and other little tidbits of interest about our ongoing research.

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