Challenges and opportunities of the spatiotemporal responses to the global pandemic of COVID-19

Figures & data

Table

Various aspects	Challenges	Opportunities
Data	Automatic long-term collection, share and use of spatiotemporal data	Expand our capabilities and cooperation with institutions across the world.
	Data sharing and security	Consider the implementation of integrated data standardization, an integration framework, and ensure integration and data integrity from a variety of data sources
	Data availability and quality for countries in the global community and rural areas	Aim to work towards using big data sources to derived datasets to enrich data in developing countries
Infrastructure	Decide the best type of cyberinfrastructure for each project	Host public applications for research groups
	Maintain high standard of security	Provide secured parallel computing services
	Expand existing computing resources with commercial cloud platforms	Strengthen collaboration with other research groups community- and world-wide
Computing & Networking	Access to high quality and private data while considering data ethics	Ensure availability of needed data to combat the global pandemic
	Optimize ML and DL models to get higher accuracy and performance	Provide valuable tools and literatures for future pandemics/related research works
	Contact tracing tools based on network analysis to notify people in real-time	Establish guidelines for researchers to identify overlooked aspects
Science & Application	socioeconomic differences in vaccine distribution	the opportunity to further improve upon data source and quality assessment
	the need for computation environments	methodologies for rapid response research
	inequality in vaccine distribution	replicable research, the opportunity to expand accessibility of data to countries who currently lack access
social structure and its role in spreading and controlling	Lack of theory model to simulate the viral cases spreading in multi-scales	Develop a cross-domain model based on social science and public health knowledge from big data accessing/monitoring availability
	Racial disparities in COVID-19 transmission	Investigate racial characteristics in COVID-19 transmissions and explore its relations to socio-economic, demographic, and environment factors in multiple geographic scales
	Inequalities in access to healthcare and health outcomes for different groups	Prioritize equity across sectors and provide resources to support efforts to advance equity
Cross Disciplines/ Converging Science	How to ensure effective communication cross domains?	Standard framework, thinking, methods, and tools
	How to create a collaborative and engaging interdisciplinary environment?	Foster cross domain collaborations, facilitate cross domain discussion, and results sharing
	Knowledge structure may not be enough	New or emerging science and research fields
Replicability	How to make replicable research feasible for a wide range of researchers from different backgrounds?	Enhance recognition and citation by promoting replicability.
	How to facilitate the global research community to replicate the research efforts conducted?	Foster collaboration among researchers across the globe.
	What are the best coding practices and internal standards that we can adapt to make replication easy and reliable?	Adopt live coding practices for open-source collaboration and interactive computing.
Community Engagement	Data inequality	Engage volunteers in data collection, establish standards, provide coordination
	Combat misinformation	Improve education for the public on COVID-19 as a health risk
	Balance privacy protection and pandemic control	Study different privacy protection approaches. Apply differential privacy algorithms on spatiotemporal data