Vida Overview
The Space Enabled research group at the MIT Media Lab is leading a US-based team of innovators from East Carolina University (Prof David Lagomasino), Blue Raster LLC (Eric Ashcroft), and consultant Dr. Mohammad Jalali. The team is actively collaborating with leaders in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia to design decision support tools to inform public policy in response to challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
This project creates a platform for collaboration between technologists to build the Vida Decision Support System, a customized online tool targeted for use by public sector officials at the city and regional level who are making policies regarding public health, the economy, or environmental management. The Vida Decision Support System helps city and regional leaders understand the relationships between important societal factors that are changing by creating models in the following areas: Public Health, Environment, Socio-economic Impacts, Public Sector Decision Making, and Disease Surveillance Technology Design. Vida is based on an integrated Data Visualization and Modeling Framework created by the Space Enabled research group at MIT that combines multiple data sources and creates simulations of the current or potential future states of a city or region (see Reid, Jack, Cynthia Zeng, and Danielle Wood. "Combining Social, Environmental and Design Models to Support the Sustainable Development Goals." In 2019 IEEE Aerospace Conference, pp. 1-13. IEEE, 2019).
Please view the material below for an overview of Vida, active work underway by the US-based team and our international collaborators, and upcoming publications and presentations related to Vida.