Built for education grounds in this time of critical recovery, Artificial Risk Index by CodingMinds (ARI-CM) is a prototype computer program that evaluates the prospects of infection, risk index, and mask usage, mask number, in specific schools.
The Risk Index runs in a scale format, from 0.33 to 10, with lower values indicating lower risk and higher value indicating higher risks. Currently, ARI-CM is trained on data from five schools in the Los Angeles, CA area. For each individual school, information on building square footage, school population, student demographics, area case rate, and mask usage determines its Risk Index. The value of mask usage is a user defined percentage. In other words, a user of ARI-CM is able to manipulate the percentage of students and staff wearing masks in a school to view its effect on the Risk Index as a whole. This function can be used for educational purposes in public communities to directly showcase how relevant mask usage is to the recovery from COVID-19.
As for ARI-CM's second ability, the program intake similar data as the Risk Index and generates the safest minimum number of masks needed of a school. This function is modeled by a system of linear equations showing the correlation between mask usage and social distancing. After the user selects a school, ARI-CM will input the schools square footage and population to determine the number of masks needed, in the case that a campus is not large enough to support its population, regardless of mask usage, ARI-CM will recommend safer alternative options.
ARI-CM is programmed by CodingMinds, a group of High School students based in Orange County, CA. In order to help their community during this period of unexpected events, CodingMinds came to the idea of calculating the danger of returning to schools in Fall 2020. From this first thought, an entire python program and HTML frontend with the ability of calculating Risk and Mask usage was built. Ultimately inspired to impact their local schools and neighborhoods, ARI-CM is but a prototype with the potential to aid student families and school boards in their decisions to open schools. As we move into the future, the hope of CodingMinds is to improve ARI-CM by reevaluating and researching new data sources and incorporating Artificial Intelligence models to create a more accurate program.
