α-Satellite: An AI-Driven System and Benchmark Datasets for Dynamic COVID-19 Risk Assessment in the United States.

Abstract

The fast evolving and deadly outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has posed grand challenges to human society. To slow the spread of virus infections and better respond for community mitigation, by advancing capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and leveraging the large-scale and up-to-date data generated from heterogeneous sources (e.g., disease related data, demographic, mobility and social media data), in this work, we propose and develop an AI-driven system (named α-Satellite), as an initial offering, to provide dynamic COVID-19 risk assessment in the United States. More specifically, given a point of interest (POI), the system will automatically provide risk indices associated with it in a hierarchical manner (e.g., state, county, POI) to enable people to select appropriate actions for protection while minimizing disruptions to daily life. To comprehensively evaluate our system for dynamic COVID-19 risk assessment, we first conduct a set of empirical studies; and then we validate it based on a real-world dataset consisting of 5,060 annotated POIs, which achieves the area of under curve (AUC) of 0.9202. As of June 18, 2020, α-Satellite has had 56,980 users. Based on the feedback from its large-scale users, we perform further analysis and have three key findings: i) people from more severe regions (i.e., with larger numbers of COVID-19 cases) have stronger interests using our system to assist with actionable information; ii) users are more concerned about their nearby areas in terms of COVID-19 risks; iii) the user feedback about their perceptions towards COVID-19 risks of their query POIs indicate the challenge of public concerns about the safety versus its negative effects on society and the economy. Our system and generated datasets have been made publicly accessible via our website.