$α$-Satellite: An AI-driven System and Benchmark Datasets for Hierarchical Community-level Risk Assessment to Help Combat COVID-19

The novel coronavirus and its deadly outbreak have posed grand challenges to human society: as of March 26, 2020, there have been 85,377 confirmed cases and 1,293 reported deaths in the United States; and the World Health Organization (WHO) characterized coronavirus disease (COVID-19) - which has infected more than 531,000 people with more than 24,000 deaths in at least 171 countries - a global pandemic. A growing number of areas reporting local sub-national community transmission would represent a significant turn for the worse in the battle against the novel coronavirus, which points to an urgent need for expanded surveillance so we can better understand the spread of COVID-19 and thus better respond with actionable strategies for community mitigation. By advancing capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and leveraging the large-scale and real-time data generated from heterogeneous sources (e.g., disease related data from official public health organizations, demographic data, mobility data, and user geneated data from social media), in this work, we propose and develop an AI-driven system (named $α$-Satellite}, as an initial offering, to provide hierarchical community-level risk assessment to assist with the development of strategies for combating the fast evolving COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, given a specific location (either user input or automatic positioning), the developed system will automatically provide risk indexes associated with it in a hierarchical manner (e.g., state, county, city, specific location) to enable individuals to select appropriate actions for protection while minimizing disruptions to daily life to the extent possible. The developed system and the generated benchmark datasets have been made publicly accessible through our website. The system description and disclaimer are also available in our website.