HackEbola @ UMass-Amherst (Nov 21-23)

Overview

Join western Massachusetts data scientists, statisticians, and digital humanitarians for a weekend-long hackathon event focused on wrangling data to gain new insights into the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Register now!

Logistics and Schedule

These are the central datasets for HackEbola.

This event will be held at UMass-Amherst in the Lederle Graduate Research Center Room 1634. The detailed schedule is available as a PDF. The schedule includes the following highlights:

• 5:30pm Friday, Nov 21: Opening workshop, team formation
• 1pm Saturday, Nov 22: HackEbola team check-in, status updates, lunch
• 3pm Sunday, Nov 23: HackEbola symposium, team presentations

Participants will be encouraged to work in teams at the UMass campus on Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday. Snacks, beverages, and lunches will served free of cost to participants.

Anyone is welcome to participate, but please register in advance, so we know how many participants to plan for!

Resources

Slides from Friday’s presentations:

• Nicholas Reich on the challenges in forecasting infectious diseases

For those interested in learning more about ebola or seeing data on the current outbreak, here are some places to start:

• CDC website on Ebola
• Science: Special Collection on Ebola
• Recent New England Journal of Medicine article
• Humanitarian Data Exchange
• Simon B Johnson’s Ebola Resources
• Shaman Group’s Ebola Forecasts

(Please suggest other resources to add in the comments section below or via pull request on GitHub!)

Data

You can get the data from here. You should also register on ChallengePost for more information.

Volunteering

Interested in volunteering for HackEbola? Are you an expert who could give a mini-lecture or tutorial on an Ebola-related topic? Able to help to organize and promote the event? Or just willing to help clean up after the event? When you register, please indicate your interest in volunteering on the registration form.

Acknowledgments

This event is being held in conjunction with the HackEbola event at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Sponsors

Thanks to our sponsors! They include the Division of Biostatistics & Epidemiology, the UMass-Amherst GRiD student group and the Western Massachusetts Data Science, Stats, and R Meetup.

Thanks also to the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at UMass Amherst for allowing us to use one of the department’s seminar rooms for the workshop.

We could not have done this without your support.