THURSDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2020 (In conjunction with the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division and the Johns Hopkins University)

Location: Zoom, 7:00 PM ET/6:00 PM CT/ 5:00 PM MT

Title: Mapping Covid-19 from Phylodynamics to Contact Tracing

Speaker: John Hessler, Specialist in Computational Geography and Geographic Information Science at the Library of Congress and Professor of Evolutionary Computation in the Graduate School of Advanced Studies at the Johns Hopkins University 

Hessler will provide an introduction to the computational techniques and the algorithmic methods that cartographers and epidemiologists are using to map the spread and origins of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2 virus). He will look at methodologies for mapping the virus' nucleotide and amino acid mutations and examine how the virus spread to the United States, looking closely at the massive amounts of complex geospatial data generated by GISAID (originally known as Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data). He will also talk about cell phone monitoring for contact tracing, touch on modern methods of sentiment analysis using geo-located tweets, and introduce the machine learning and spatial analysis algorithms that are helping scientists understand, in real-time, the spread and geospatial dynamics of the current pandemic.

John Hessler is Specialist in Computational Geography and Geographic Information Science at the Library of Congress and Professor of Evolutionary Computation in the Graduate School of Advanced Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the founder of the New Geometries Lab, whose research applies geospatial data, with evolutionary computation, along with advances in bioinformatics, to solve complex spatial analysis problems, like mapping COVID-19. His publications cover a wide range of topics including The Naming of America: Martin Waldseemüller’ 1507 Map and Cosmographiæ Introductio (Library of Congress, 2008) and Map: Exploring the World (Phaidon, 2015).

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When: Sep 10, 2020 07:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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Image one: Phylogenetic Tree and Map showing the spread of the D614G Amino Acid Mutation of SARS-CoV-2

Image two: Machine Learning Analysis of COVID-19 Sentiment Expressed in World-Wide Geo-Located Tweets