The international community must collaborate to mitigate climate change and sustain economic growth. However, collaboration is hard to achieve, partly because no global authority can ensure compliance with international climate agreements. Combining AI with climate-economic simulations offers a promising solution to design international frameworks, including negotiation protocols and climate agreements, that promote and incentivize collaboration. In addition, these frameworks should also have policy goals fulfillment, and sustained commitment, taking into account climate-economic dynamics and strategic behaviors. These challenges require an interdisciplinary approach across machine learning, economics, climate science, law, policy, ethics, and other fields. Towards this objective, we organized AI for Global Climate Cooperation, a Mila competition in which teams submitted proposals and analyses of international frameworks, based on (modifications of) RICE-N, an AI-driven integrated assessment model (IAM). In particular, RICE-N supports modeling regional decision-making using AI agents. Furthermore, the IAM then models the climate-economic impact of those decisions into the future. Whereas the first track focused only on performance metrics, the proposals submitted to the second track were evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative evaluation focused on a combination of (i) the degree of mitigation of global temperature rise and (ii) the increase in economic productivity. On the other hand, an interdisciplinary panel of human experts in law, policy, sociology, economics and environmental science, evaluated the solutions qualitatively. In particular, the panel considered the effectiveness, simplicity, feasibility, ethics, and notions of climate justice of the protocols. In the third track, the participants were asked to critique and improve RICE-N.

Background: Common data models solve many challenges of standardizing electronic health record (EHR) data, but are unable to semantically integrate all the resources needed for deep phenotyping. Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry ontologies provide computable representations of biological knowledge and enable the integration of heterogeneous data. However, mapping EHR data to OBO ontologies requires significant manual curation and domain expertise. Objective: We introduce OMOP2OBO, an algorithm for mapping Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) vocabularies to OBO ontologies. Results: Using OMOP2OBO, we produced mappings for 92,367 conditions, 8611 drug ingredients, and 10,673 measurement results, which covered 68-99% of concepts used in clinical practice when examined across 24 hospitals. When used to phenotype rare disease patients, the mappings helped systematically identify undiagnosed patients who might benefit from genetic testing. Conclusions: By aligning OMOP vocabularies to OBO ontologies our algorithm presents new opportunities to advance EHR-based deep phenotyping.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread rapidly worldwide, overwhelming manual contact tracing in many countries and resulting in widespread lockdowns for emergency containment. Various DCT methods have been proposed, each making tradeoffs between privacy, mobility restrictions, and public health. The most common approach, binary contact tracing (BCT), models infection as a binary event, informed only by an individual's test results, with corresponding binary recommendations that either all or none of the individual's contacts quarantine. BCT ignores the inherent uncertainty in contacts and the infection process, which could be used to tailor messaging to high-risk individuals, and prompt proactive testing or earlier warnings. It also does not make use of observations such as symptoms or preexisting medical conditions, which could be used to make more accurate infectiousness predictions. In this paper, we use a recently-proposed COVID-19 epidemiological simulator to develop and test methods that can be deployed to a smartphone to locally and proactively predict an individual's infectiousness (risk of infecting others) based on their contact history and other information, while respecting strong privacy constraints. Predictions are used to provide personalized recommendations to the individual via an app, as well as to send anonymized messages to the individual's contacts, who use this information to better predict their own infectiousness, an approach we call proactive contact tracing (PCT). Similarly to other works, we find that compared to no tracing, all DCT methods tested are able to reduce spread of the disease and thus save lives, even at low adoption rates, strongly supporting a role for DCT methods in managing the pandemic. Further, we find a deep-learning based PCT method which improves over BCT for equivalent average mobility, suggesting PCT could help in safe reopening and second-wave prevention. Until pharmaceutical interventions such as a vaccine become available, control of the COVID-19 pandemic relies on nonpharmaceutical interventions such as lockdown and social distancing. While these have often been successful in limiting spread of the disease in the short term, these restrictive measures have important negative social, mental health, and economic impacts. Digital contact tracing (DCT), a technique to track the spread of the virus among individuals in a population using smartphones, is an attractive potential solution to help reduce growth in the number of cases and thereby allow more economic and social activities to resume while keeping the number of cases low. All bolded terms are defined in the Glossary; Appendix 1.