Welcome to ACADIC
ACADIC-The Africa-Canada Artificial Intelligence and Data Innovation Consortium, was created in January 2020. This newly formed interdisciplinary Consortium draws on insights from artificial intelligence, data sciences, data management, disease modelling, global health, citizen science, community engagement, participatory research, and race and climate justice to design practical tools and locally relevant interventions that address the disproportionate impact of pandemics and other disasters on our communities.
Led by York University Professor Jude Kong, the IDRC and SIDA funded (under The Global South AI4COVID Program) ACADIC brings together an interdisciplinary team of artificial intelligence experts, data scientists, disaster and emergency management experts, clinical public health experts, epidemiologists, physicists, statisticians, mathematicians, modelers and software engineers from Botswana, Cameroon, Canada, Eswatini, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
ACADIC is deeply engaged in using Artificial Intelligence and Data Innovation to
i) support and design vaccination strategies help keep the number of COVID-19 cases requiring hospital care below the maximum hospital capacity;
ii) respond to emerging COVID-19 Variants of Concern, and to maximize the impacts of available supply of different vaccines;
iii) create technological platforms for systemic risk assessment and management;
iv) harness “hard to get” data; etc.
To these ends, Consortium partners are pioneering COVID Dashboards to support clinical public health decision making, including the Dashboard for the Gauteng Province of South Africa, which is among the very best in the world. Consortium partners are also pioneering anonymous digital gender violence reporting platforms to improve statistics on incidence and locations of assaults.
The ACADIC Consortium creates cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence data-driven applications for optimization of resources and policy and practice decision making to address the COVID-19 pandemic nationally or locally. The Consortium has several key publications, and its recent paper “Leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Big Data to optimize COVID-19 clinical public health and vaccination roll-out strategies in Africa” is among the top ten most viewed in the Lancet SSRN preprint series.
