Rt-Collabathon:
An Epidemic Rt estimate Collaborative

Join us in Boston for the Rt-Collabathon, a collaborative marathon from September 24-26, 2024. This event, supported by Insight Net, brings together researchers from diverse fields to advance methodologies and computational tools for estimating the effective reproductive number (Rt) in epidemic modeling.

Our goals are to refine the technical aspects of Rt estimation and foster sustained innovation in public health responses. The collabathon will:

Review and integrate existing Rt estimation tools

Conduct performance analyses

Initiate new software development to address emerging challenges
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Participants will compare different methodologies, develop benchmarks, and discuss enhancements for tools like EpiEstim and EpiNow2, including spatial analysis and mobility factors.

Community building is a key focus, aiming to define future goals, create a community-supported framework for Rt estimation tools, and ensure scalability and modularity for future development. This event greatly contributes to ongoing collaboration, idea generation, and methodological innovation in epidemic modeling.

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‍Applicants from all stages of their career are eligible to apply. The application form can be found here. Please also take a moment to participate in our survey.

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What is a “collabathon”?‍

A collabathon (combination of “collaboration” and “hackathon”) is a multi-day event where researchers come together to build software and form collaborations around one core idea. The idea of a collabathon is inspired by large scale collaborations in fields like cosmology and physics, where hundreds of researchers work together to discover and analyze a new fundamental phenomenon (e.g. the recent discovery of gravity waves). By nature, collabathons are infrastructural. The output from any one collabathon is not meant to be a finished research project; instead, collabathons are useful for creating and consolidating a set of tools that make future research easier and more streamlined for a range of communities. Along the way, however, collabathons undoubtedly bring forth new ideas—both in the development of new methods and in new research directions.

Collabathons are most successful when there is a range of roles, career stages, and personnel all contributing. Some people will be drawn to implementation of techniques, others will work more on developing theory or documentation, others will serve multiple roles. Participants should be willing to work collaboratively and flexibly in a fast-paced environment with diverse perspectives, collectively working towards a large-scale goal.