COVID-19 data hub platform wins 2024 open data quality award
A collaborative initiative by Professor David Ardia
April 1, 2025
Created in 2020 by Associate Professor David Ardia and Emanuele Guidotti (a PhD student at Université de Neuchâtel at the time), the COVID-19 Data Hub platform has just won the 2024 Open Data Quality Award, presented by the Canadian Open Data Community.
Initially funded by the Artificial Intelligence Consortium IVADO, with subsequent backing from the R Consortium (2021-2024) and the University of Lugano, this large-scale project aims to provide the research community with a reliable and unified dataset on COVID-19. “With the proliferation of databases, there was a need for a platform that integrated these various sources to enable comprehensive analysis,” explains David Ardia. Our goal was to create a tool that could establish relationships between medical information and sociopolitical factors.”
This project includes detailed epidemiological variables, policy measures compiled by Oxford, and various spatial databases, and has been featured in the Journal of Open Source Software (2020) and Scientific Data (2022).
David Ardia
About David Ardia
David Ardia earned a PhD (Financial Econometrics) from Université de Fribourg, a Master’s degree in Applied Sciences (Quantitative Finance) from École polytechnique fédérale de Zürich, and an MSc (Financial Engineering) from Université de Neuchâtel. He is a member of IVADO, the Group for Research in Decision Analysis (GERAD) and the International Statistical Institute and is also a Louis Bachelier Fellow.
This professor in HEC Montréal’s Department of Decision Sciences since 2019 holds the Research Professorship in Sentometrics and also serves as Associate editor at the International Journal of Forecasting and the Journal of Statistical Software. He has a keen interest in machine learning and natural language processing methods for asset allocation, risk management, and economic forecasting.
Sources: IVADO and HEC Montréal
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