Congratulations Associate Professor Samsung Lim
CVEN academic’s research helps contribute to COVID-19 containment.
Published on the 12 May 2021 by Mary OConnell
The School’s expert in geospatial information science, Associate Professor Samsung Lim, is part of a cross disciplinary research team recently awarded almost $800,000 from the government for AI development for early pandemic detection.
A/Prof Lim has been collaborating with Professor Raina MacIntyre at Kirby Institute since 2016 on a number of GIS-based epidemiology studies, including the mitigation of emerging biological and chemical threats, geospatial analysis of emerging avian influenza viruses, anthrax dispersion modelling, and a randomised controlled clinical trial of mask use in control of respiratory outcomes during bushfire season.
“Our collaboration in the past two years was timely” Lim notes, “and we were able to contribute to the COVID-19 containment. This helped us receive such a highly competitive Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF).”
Professor MacIntyre leads a research program in control and prevention of infectious diseases, spanning epidemiology, risk analysis, vaccinology, bioterrorism, mathematical modelling, public health and clinical trials.
At the CVEN end, Lim has been contributing to the spatio-temporal pattern recognition, integration of spatial analysis and data mining, exploratory data analysis, and predictive modelling of epidemic diseases.
The collaborative project team includes Associate Professor David Heslop (School of Population Health, UNSW), Associate Professor Samsung Lim, Associate Professor Lina Yao and Dr Helen Paik (UNSW Engineering), and Dr Cecile Paris and the team from CSIRO’s Data 61.
For more details see the article "Australian Government awards almost $800,000 to AI development for early pandemic detection".
Figure 1. Trends in spatial clusters of COVID-19 cases in New South Wales within 14 days of arrival of Australian evacuees from Diamond Princess cruise ship (February 21st to March 19th, 2020).