Not really random, since it’s bound to a fellowship that I have, but I’m a member of the Lancet-American University of Beirut Commission on Syria team as a data scientist with the FXB Center.
…The Lancet and the American University of Beirut have together established the Commission on Syria: Health in Conflict. The aim of the Commission is to describe, analyse, interrogate, and decry the calamity before us. The lens is health and wellbeing, always a productive way to assess grave issues of high mortality and morbidity, disruptions of home, family, settlement, environment, and such extensive loss that the future itself is hard to discern. With this Commission, we have embarked on the difficult effort to identify these costs and enumerate them where possible. Hence, the first task ahead is to account for the burden of war. We will also examine the challenges of the international response to the crisis and learn the lessons for future crises. The Commission will develop concrete recommendations to address the unmet current and future health needs, including those related to rebuilding and to strengthening the global health response to political conflict.
It sort of is a random software project because I have a full time job and do (unpaid) work for this in addition to that. The kickoff meeting is in 10 days, so I’m working on a few websites that serve data tools from previous germane projects.
One of the more interesting ones was a “data mapping” project done in one of the states in India. A bunch of medical students and residents collaborating with our team visited all of the community, district, and state public health clinics there and recorded which data points are collected about patients and which registries (often paper) they are recorded in. There’s a “flow” of the data in the registries, where they are submitted to offices at higher levels, etc. The point of the project was to try to identify redundancies that potentially can be eliminated with a more centralized and mobile-accessible health information system. As part of that project, I took all of the data they collected and performed network analysis on it. I also took a graph structure of the flow of the data through the registries and used sigma.js to create a navigable map of the data hierarchy. It was the first phase in the project and was pretty interesting.
Other than that, I keep plugging away at my ten-minute game jam concept, when I have some time. I wish I had more time to play with that.
Very much this.