The MIDAS Coordination Center team continues to be engaged with a range of ongoing activities. On the research side, we are exploring ensembling methods, creating modeling benchmarks, and exploring the use of large language models to extract critical details from infectious disease reports and to summarize details of published modeling papers. Our ongoing data curation and harmonization efforts have added many resources to the MIDAS catalog, and we are working on increasing our coverage of educational resources and software tools. We continue to support the Scenario Modeling Hub, which just released results of its 19th round of COVID-19 projections.
In response to feedback from members, we’ve also taken some steps to build communities of interest. Earlier this month, the first meeting of the MIDAS public health interest group brought together modelers interested in building collaborations with local health agencies. A second meeting is in the works, and we’ll be reaching out to our contacts in the public health world soon as well.
We’re hoping to create other similar groups within the MIDAS community. We have a student network and a Latin American group, and we’re prepared to support many others. If you have an idea for a group, please let us know and we’ll help you get things rolling.
We’re also ready to support other forms of community activities. If you have ideas for workshops, educational offerings, modeling challenges, or anything else that might be of interest to MIDAS members, please let us know. We will try to do what we can to help you make it happen. Of course, we’re always interested in hearing suggestions or requests for data that you might find useful in support of your modeling work.
The common theme of all of these efforts is engagement and feedback. We look to MIDAS members to tell us what would be of most use to our community. Our wonderful Steering Committee provides invaluable perspective, but we still need to hear from you. Please drop us a line — let us know what we can do for you. We’d be happy to discuss, and we’ll do what we can to help.
One final note. We’re still working on planning for MIDAS 2025 in November. Details will be coming soon.
We hope to hear from you soon.
