The American Statistical Association (ASA) presented the 2021 Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry, and Government (SPAIG) Award to Roni Rosenfeld and Ryan Tibshirani of Carnegie Mellon University's Delphi Research Group and their COVIDcast partners for their "commitment to the theory and practice of epidemic tracking and forecasting through building and modeling unique public health data streams."

The Delphi Research Group was assembled to make epidemiological tools to improve forecasting efforts that help healthcare organizations. While originally focused on seasonal influenza, the team shifted its approach to focus on tracking COVID-19 in early 2020. The group worked with industry partners to evaluate large databases to track illness, monitor mask wearing and explore vaccine hesitancy across the country. The group shared its findings on its COVIDcast website.

"We grew from a prepandemic team of seven or eight to more than 50 members, who are mostly volunteers," said Tibshirani, associate professor in the Statistics & Data Science and Machine Learning departments at CMU. "They are giving us time from their normal 'day jobs' throughout the pandemic, so it is extremely rewarding to receive recognition for everyone's contribution to these efforts."

Rosenfeld, the head of the Machine Learning Department in the School of Computer Science, said that 2020 was an opening salvo in the war against viruses and disease. While tragic and unnerving, it provided the world a window of clarity to understand the risk and danger inherent in these microscopic threats and the opportunity to prepare so the world can manage the next battle more effectively.

"The general consensus is that this is not a once in a hundred years pandemic, but something like it will happen again sooner," Rosenfeld said. "We are likely to encounter something as challenging again in the next decade, so I feel a sense of urgency. We need to leverage this and other partnerships to improve how we handle public health emergencies moving forward."

This SPAIG Award also honors Carrie Reed, Matt Biggerstaff, Michael Johansson, Rachel Slayton, Velma Lopez, Jo Walker and the CDC COVID-19 Modeling Team; Hal Varian, Brett Slatkin, the Google Surveys Team and Google.org's CMU-Delphi Fellows; Kang-Xing Jin, Curtiss Cobb and the Demography and Survey Science, Data for Good and Health teams at Facebook; Swami Sivasubramanian, Alex Smola and Amazon AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS); Tim Suther, Craig Midgett, Andrew Harris, Mina Atia, Anil Konda and Jaydeep Kulkarni at Change Healthcare; John Santelli, Paul Nielsen, Danita Kiser and the Optum data team at Optum; and John Tamerius, Jhobe Steadman and Torsten Auhorn at Quidel Inc.

The Delphi Group has worked with the CDC since 2012, but most of the partnerships with industry and healthcare are new. Quidel Corp shared de-identified antigen test data. Change Healthcare and Optum shared de-identified medical insurance claims.

Facebook offered its platform and access to large membership to run anonymous surveys to gain insight in the spread of symptoms, concerns about personal finances, and mask-wearing and vaccine hesitancy — to name only a few. To date, the team has gathered more than 20 million survey results. Google also ran surveys for Delphi toward the beginning of the pandemic, and more recently helped to track search inquiries for COVID symptoms, like loss of the sense of smell or taste, and provided 13 full-time fellows for six months. Google also donated $1 million to the project. Finally, AWS provided COVIDcast cloud computing support.

"There are very few good things about a pandemic, but the one thing that was uplifting was the large number of people and organizations that were moved by it to operate in a way that you don't often see," Rosenfeld said. "In a sense, it was like we are fighting a war together, and in a war you discover your shared humanity. That made me feel good."

The Delphi approach has been unprecedented. While most governmental information is targeted at the state level, few datasets offer the local perspective needed for public health. The endeavors of Delphi and its partners made it possible to dig into the granularity of data at the county level and lower, allowing them to view changes that could be impactful for public health.

"A silver lining of this whole experience is that it provides the blueprint on what to do next," said Tibshirani. "Everyone is now keenly aware of the importance of the long-game of epidemic and pandemic tracking, moving it to an operational science to understand the importance of auxiliary data streams."

The annual ASA SPAIG Award, which was established in 2002, highlights outstanding partnerships between academe, industry and government organizations and promotes new partnerships. The Delphi Group was joined this year by the Intermediate Clinical Endpoints of Cancer of the Prostate (ICECaP) Working Group at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in receiving this honor. The award is sponsored by the SPAIG committee of the ASA and is distinct from other ASA awards in that it recognizes outstanding collaborations between organizations, while recognizing key individual contributors.