The Cartesian Cafe

Po-Shen Loh | The Mathematics of COVID-19 Contact Tracing

Listen Later

Po-Shen Loh is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a coach for the US Math Olympiad. He is also a social entrepreneur where he has his used his passion and expertise in mathematics in the service of education (expii.com) and epidemiology (novid.org).

In this episode, we discuss the mathematics behind Loh's novel approach to contact tracing in the fight against COVID, which involves a beautiful blend of graph theory and computer science.

Originally published on March 3, 2022 on Youtube: https://youtu.be/8CLxLBMGxLE

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/timothynguyen

Timestamps:

  • 00:00:00 : Introduction
  • 00:01:11 : About Po-Shen Loh
  • 00:03:49 : NOVID app
  • 00:04:47 : Graph theory and quarantining
  • 00:08:39 : Graph adjacency definition for contact tracing
  • 00:16:01 : Six degrees of separation away from anyone?
  • 00:21:13 : Getting the game theory and incentives right
  • 00:30:40 : Conventional approach to contact tracing
  • 00:34:47 : Comparison with big tech
  • 00:39:19 : Neighbor search complexity
  • 00:45:15 : Watts-Strogatz small networks phenomenon
  • 00:48:37 : Storing neighborhood information
  • 00:57:00 : Random hashing to reduce computational burden
  • 01:05:24 : Logarithmic probing of sparsity
  • 01:09:56 : Two math PhDs struggle to do division
  • 01:11:17 : Bitwise-or for union of bounded sets
  • 01:16:21 : Step back and recap
  • 01:26:15 : Tradeoff between number of hash bins and sparsity
  • 01:29:12 : Conclusion

    • Further reading:

    Po-Shen Loh. "Flipping the Perspective in Contact Tracing" https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.03806

    ...more
    View all episodesView all episodes
    Download on the App Store
    The Cartesian CafeBy Timothy Nguyen
    • 4.7
    • 4.7
    • 4.7
    • 4.7
    • 4.7

    4.7

    51 ratings

    More shows like The Cartesian Cafe

    View all
    Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas by Sean Carroll | Wondery

    Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

    4,144 Listeners

    The Math Club by Pete and Noah

    The Math Club

    10 Listeners