CELEHS Year-End Update

During the COVID pandemic, the HMS-HSPH Translational Data Science Center for a Learning Healthcare System (CELEHS), led by Director Tianxi Cai, has been busy contributing to international scientific efforts to develop a better understanding of the COVID-19 clinical course. The CELEHS center has been leading analytical efforts for the 4CE COVID-19 international consortium consisting of over 300 hospitals across six countries. The overarching goal of the consortium effort is to inform doctors, epidemiologists and the public about the clinical characterization of COVD-19 patients through analysis of EHR data acquired through the healthcare process. CELEHS researchers have been actively contributing their statistical and EHR expertise to these efforts.

This year the CELEHS Data Science in Action summer program on “Convolutional Neural Networks for Self-Driving Cars” was extended to two weeks to incorporate a pre-course introduction to the programming language Python. During the second week, the course introduced high school students to programming and data science. Participants learned to program neural networks to recognize images and use them to make their own self-driving toy cars. As the course was taught remotely, each student had the challenge of assembling their own car.  Fortunately,  they encountered no issues thanks to their resourceful TAs, Tabitha Oanda, Winston Cai, and Yining Hua, and instructors, PhD candidate Aarón Sonabend and Biostats alumna Professor Jesse Gronsbell.  A silver lining to the remote format was that the program was able to expand its reach, developing young future data scientists all across the country. We hope to continue with this endeavor as we move forward for next year!