PhD candidate at the Department of Statistics, AUEB, was distinguished in the EUvsVirus Hackathon challenge

Kostis Matzorakis, PhD candidate at the Department of Statistics, School of Information Sciences and Technology, Athens University of Economics and Business, was distinguished in the challenge EUvsVIRUS Hackathon as a member of the Greek team of the project Enforce, which won second place in the category “Digital Finance/Availability of Emergency Health Insurance”.

The EUvsVIRUS Hackathon challenge held at the end of April 2020 is an initiative of the European Commission to identify best solutions to support the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. In collaboration with private and public partners, the committee awarded the best teams and solutions per domain as well as a winner and two runner-ups for each of the 37 challenges. Altogether 117 out of 2160 solutions.

The Enforce solution is a platform designed to provide immediate access to health insurance coverage for people who already have symptoms of COVID-19 during quarantine. The idea of ​​the project came up by the data given during the competition. It was a data set from hospitals around the world with inpatients with COVID-19, along with other characteristics such as symptoms, age, and duration of hospitalization. The theory of Bayesian Statistics and Data Analysis was used by the PhD candidate to create the Enforce platform.

As a winner of the Hackathon challenge, the Enforce project was selected to take part in the Pan-European Matchathon. There, the team collaborated at European level, with private and public actors, aiming at the use of the project as a tool to combat the pandemic. Nikolaos Demiris, Assistant Professor of the Department of Statistics, AUEB, also contributed to the final form of the model of the Enforce project.