 Hello, everybody. My name is Florence Hudson. I'm the Executive Director and Principal Investigator for the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub at Columbia University and the COVID Information Commons. And I'm delighted to be at CNI again, giving you an update on our COVID Information Commons, which is an open portal and community for research collaboration. I presented in November of 2020 about the kick and we had just received the award that year. And it had grown quite a bit, but a lot more has happened since then. So first let me give you a little background about what we do at the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub. We're our Executive Director. The Northeast Hub is a community convener, collaboration hub, and catalyst for data science innovation in the Northeast region and really around the world. Building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community with accessible resources is central to our work. And so you'll see a lot about our accessibility initiatives. And we are now a community at the hub of over 8,300 individuals from over 1,300 organizations, which is across all 50 U.S. states and 61 countries. And everybody is welcome to join us. When I first became Executive Director of the Hub at the beginning of 2020, we had reached 1,400 people. Now it's over 8,300. We've grown six times. And that's because we do a lot of outreach. And we try to create programs that are very engaging. We're funded by NSF grants for the Big Data Hub. We're very grateful for their support, as well as a Cybersecurity Risk Award and also two awards for this COVID Information Commons, and one from the NIH AMAHED program, which is artificial intelligence, machine learning, twins, health equity, and research, and diversity. So our four focus areas guide our community engagement activities. Education Data Literacy is one of our four focus areas. And there's a separate presentation with myself and our National Student Data Corps program manager, Emily Rothenberg, in this audio series. You can listen to that too. Health is our second focus area, where the COVID Information Commons aligns very well. Third focus area is urban communities and then responsible data science, including security, privacy, and ethics. So this is what we do at the hub, and we engage thousands of people around the world. So the Big Data Hub activities leverage data science for good. How can we use data for good? Research your collaboration, improve health equity, improve health outcomes, improve cybersecurity and privacy. And the kick or the COVID Information Commons is the Northeast Hub's premier health focus area program. You can see here Education Data Literacy programs, the NSDC National Student Data Corps, another presentation in this series, and then the kick. And then we have the other program areas as well. So the COVID Information Commons was funded in 2020 by an NSF Rapid Award. And the Rapid Awards are for rapid in, rapid out. You send them a proposal, they give you the money very quickly, and they want you to execute quickly, because there's some type of an emergency they're asking us to work on. In this case, the Rapid Awards in 2020 were related to the COVID pandemic. So they contacted us in March NSF and said, you know, could you create a portal where anybody could easily find the NSF-funded COVID-related Rapid Awards? And do that with the four Big Data Hubs. The Northeast Hub is one of four Big Data Hubs funded by the National Science Foundation 2015, and then extended in 2019 through 2023 and now 2024. So we said, sure, we could create this portal. At the time, I went into the NSF Simple Search website, there were 32 Rapid COVID Awards. Now fast forward, we have over 10,000 awards in this kick database, and it was extended in 2021 with a new award, the Kick E, we call it the COVID Infocommas Extension, to add NIH Awards and all current NSF awards related to COVID. So the COVID Information Commons serves as an open resource to explore research addressing the COVID-19 pandemic and enable this collaboration through a community. So we have two key mechanisms, search mechanisms for the information, we have a COVID Awards and PI database, and a research, explore machine learning map clustering tool, which you'll see. There are also many other resources here beyond the kick search tools. We have videos from each of the researchers that have done a lightning talk in one of our webinars, and we have over 125 of those now. We have databases and groups and guides and events and all sorts of things, and this is openly available to everybody around the world. So the COVID Information Commons are kick as we call it. Let's look at the purpose and plan. So it's an NSF funded project designed to be a trusted resource for COVID research. That's what's really critical, that it's a trusted resource. It was funded in May of 2020, and then we launched it in July of 2020. Remember, I said it's rapid, wrap it in, wrap it out, rapidly deploy. It was designing collaboration with the foreign NSF big data hubs, plus the Columbia University Libraries team and Columbia University IT. And actually, when we presented this November 2020, Jeremiah from Columbia University Libraries and the Research Data Department actually presented with me to talk about how they were working with us and helping us look at how to present the information, manage the information, categorize the information for ease of use. And they've been wonderful to work with. It was designed to provide findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable information, metadata and data. It includes the NSF COVID Rapid Awards, leveraging the NSF database and a machine learning clustering tool. And we also asked the principal investigators of the awards to provide information to contextualize their abstracts, adding to it their Orchid ID research websites and keywords. And so this was the purpose and plan of the original kick. We've made a lot of progress. So when we spoke to you in 2020, we talked about 732 awards, originally in the machine learning maps tool, and then we launched the awards and PI database, and we had up to 990 in 2020. So in 2021, NSF gave us a $2 million extension for the kick, and it funded significant expansion over four years. So it goes through September 2025. We've had 10x corpus growth of the data. So it now includes 10,000 plus NSF and NIH COVID awards. I really should say metadata. It's information about these awards. We were very grateful that NSF funded this, but COVID is a disease. Coronavirus is a disease. We really wanted to make sure we had NIH information in there as well. So now we have from 990 awards at the end of 2020 to over 10,000 in the kick. Also, the community has grown over 10 times. So when we spoke to you in 2020, there are, I think, 250 individuals we said in the kick community. Now they're almost 3,000. It's 736 organizations in the U.S. and 35 countries. We also launched a kick student paper challenge, and we've grown it. There were three undergraduate winners in 2021. Then we added the graduate cohort, and we had five winning teams in 2022, both an undergraduate and a graduate student cohort. And we're now funding prizes for the top three winning teams in each cohort, grad and undergrad, through the kick extension award. We also added an accessibility program so that English and Spanish transcripts and translations have been created of all the research or lightning talks with students and volunteers. We have a plan for advanced COVID data and metadata search and discovery tools going into the future to be able to link together not just the award information from NSF and NIH awards in the corpus, but also leveraging the DOIs, the digital object identifiers, the research websites that the PIs and the researchers provide so that people can get to more of this information and the results of the research to help us not only with continued COVID recovery, but also to prepare for the future. We also plan to leverage Dryad to archive the kick corpus. So we've made a lot of progress and there's more that we're going to keep doing. So as I mentioned, the kick is a portal and a community. The portal includes all these awards, these different search tools. We also have a user tutorial and demo videos so that you can learn how to use these different tools. We have links to events, challenges and working groups and global resources, including over 80 datasets from six continents and over 60 groups and guides. And this is a picture of the kick home page and you can see the best impact of the community and where people are around the world involved with the COVID info comments. So the community itself has all of these, you know, 10,000 PIs are invited to participate in the events. We have almost 3,000 people that are actively engaged through our newsletters, our research lightning talks, and we've been very fortunate from the beginning. When we received the funding in May of 2020, we planned to launch. We launched in July with a launch webinar. We expected maybe 25 people. We had 178 attendees and we asked two of the PIs to present lightning talks about their planned research. Interestingly, 40 more PIs offered to do lightning talks. So in our first launch webinar, we said, okay, not only is the kick a portal, but now it's a community. Welcome to the community and we will keep running these lightning talk webinars until we're done. And we're still doing it three years later. So we were doing it monthly at the beginning and having people present, you know, eight or 10 minutes each, maybe seven or eight minutes each, because they were talking about what will my research be. Now they talk about what was my research, what were the results of what am I doing next. So now we have them quarterly and we let them speak for longer. So we talked about the community growing so much, almost 3,000 people around the world. And these community webinars, we've done 26 with a total of 128 researcher lightning talks. And between the live views during the webinars and our YouTube views, there have been over 10,800 total views of the webinars. And we also break out the individual PI lightning talks. So if somebody wants to see what Nora Garza spoke about over the radio college, they can go look at her PI lightning talk. And it's also in her PI profile in the COVID info comments. And we knew we were on to something valuable when in this first, in this September research lightning talk webinar, when Nora presented, she actually said on the webinar and you can watch it on our YouTube channel, your site and the ability to come together is marvelous. I thank you especially for thinking about this and bringing us together. People will be able to use your kick site as a proper safe true information source, which exactly was our goal. When we had our kick award, we actually got a no cost extension to add some accessibility and language resources. So the lightning talk videos are posted on the YouTube website. And we also with the help of our students, staff and volunteers, we actually transcribe the videos into written English and translate them into universal Spanish, written universal Spanish. Then we upload them to the Columbia academic comments. So they're very accessible, very available. If you'd like to volunteer to be part of this effort, please let us know. You could always email us at info at COVID info commons.net. And it's easy to access the kick researcher lightning talk videos and the English and Spanish transcripts in the meet the researchers area that we were talking about. You can actually go in there and then either look by PI, you can look by category. So this one is let's say COVID in Education. And we find this related award using real life COVID-19 data to teach quantitative reasoning skills to undergraduate and graduate Spanish students. And then you can read an English transcript, you click through to read the English transcript. We say who was transcribed by and this is one of our grad students at the time at Columbia and Lawrence operations communications manager at the hub and the kick. And then you can read in Spanish. And so then you can go forward and click through. And then you can see here's her English transcript and her Spanish transcript. So this helps people who think it's Spanish to be able to read it in Spanish and also to read it in English. And so they get to learn in a broad way and in a way that's very customized for them. We're open to having other languages as well. We actually work with a lot of Hispanic serving institutions at the hub and the kick. We work with 97 of them. So we have a large Hispanic speaking population. And we actually just had a researcher from from Madrid present on a recent webinar. So it's really growing the Spanish language resources and we're delighted about that. So the main website search engine is a COVID awards and researcher PI database. So through this PI database, you can put in a keyword, you can find NSF and NIH awards. You can look at funder, you know, is it NSF or NIH, you can pick by directorate or institute and center at NIH, the awardee organization. And as mentioned, we have over 10,000 NSF and NIH with COVID related awards. And it grows every month. We have APIs that we use to actually download the latest metadata about the current awards. So we also have these PI profiles. So if you're to kick on one of the awards, like the COVID information commons award, then you would see I was the PI and you would click on it. You could see my email address, my institution, my orchid ID, I provided all this information, the websites that we have, and then my lightning talk. And then down here, we have the awards that I've received related to COVID. And then down here, keywords. And if you click on one of these keywords, it brings you back to the PI database and award database and uses that in the keyword search to find other PI is doing work in that area. We also have this very cool COVID information commons research, explore and machine learning maps tool based on lingo for a G from carrot search in Poland. And it allows you to find COVID researchers and research by PI institution award numbers state clustered by a topic using machine learning algorithms. And you can input domain areas or keywords to limit the view to target areas. This shows about 10,000 awards. And you can see here, there's some interesting clustering adults older, very interesting. So some things going on with older adults, education centers and translational research, probably virus cell and meeting. So there are different things and different ways that you could look at this information. You could also query the kick by keyword. So if you put epidemiology in here, and then you hit analyze, you'll get the 387 of the 10,000 documents in scope of that. And you can see here, we have organized and presented with the PI name in it. And if you were to click on any of these, it would give you the information about the award on the right. And then you can also flip it up. So let's say that here you're looking at it, and you say that, okay, I'm looking at this, I'm seeing this by PI name, very interesting. Paul Fox, where is Paul now? Oh, Paul is over at the Cleveland Clinic, very interesting. And so you can actually toggle between these two different views and do that for a lot of these different awards. So it could be that you want to look by institution, you could actually look by state. And then after you see institution, you could say, hmm, who is that human? Who are they? Oh, who is it at Colorado State? That's right down the block on the Colorado School of Minds. Oh, Brian Geiss. Oh, I was supposed to stop with Brian. So it actually enables the human connection as well as the research connections. We also have the Kick Student Paper Challenge I was mentioning. We had the first one in 2021. It was just an undergraduate challenge. We wanted to try it to see how it worked out. It worked out great. So then in 2022, we announced it as an undergraduate and a graduate student paper challenge. And we had five different winners. We actually had winning teams, some of them were together. And you can see our international reach because we actually had one of our winners from the University of South Africa, which was really amazing. There's also a video on here from one of the students, Aditya Kilkarni, and he actually talks about how he did his research. We did another student paper challenge this year in 2023, final submissions are due August 14th and we'll announce the winners later this year. And then we also have new working groups. We have a Kick Student Working Group. They meet by weekly and they talk about research areas. They want to work on together along COVID is a very interesting topic and a hot topic. And then there is a research working group for all researchers, not just students. And we're working on a number of things together and you're welcome to join any of these meetings. And we have these meetings monthly. So I wanted to give you a feel for what are these Lightning Talk webinars look like. We've done 26 of them now. And we say meet the scientists seeking new insights on COVID-19. So we have the PIs do Lightning Talks. And then we have a Q&A at the end. Here you can see in April of 2023 with Ellen Foxman from Yale talk about host response-based screening for unexpected or emerging respiratory viruses. And she was funded by NIAID. And then we had others as well, funded by NSF, Biological Sciences, the PIP, Protective Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention, as well as NSF Engineering. And then in July we actually had a researcher that his research is in the National Library of Medicine at NIH. So we invited him. And then we also had other NSF and student paper challenge winners that we had present to give them a great opportunity for professional development. So that's the update on the COVID Info Commons. It has grown from 250 people in the community to almost 3,000 between 2020 and 2023. It has grown from 723 awards initially to 990 and actually now over 10,000. And we continue to bring researchers together to learn from their research and to talk about how we can apply that research for good today and into the future. So thank you very much for having me join you today. And if you'd like to contact us, here's my email address, foreignstudhudson.columbia.edu. And at any time you can go to covidinfocommons.net. And we hope you can take advantage of these resources. Thank you very much and have a great day.