Covid-19: a view from above, a view from the ground

This panel is made up of individuals who have researched responses to Covid-19 -- Professor Anton Korinek of University of Virginia, and Divya Siddarth, a Microsoft researcher -- and those who have worked on solutions on the ground -- Agatha Bacelar, Projects Manager at Curative Labs, and Ann Lee, CEO of CORE. These varied perspectives will give a rich picture on what Covid-19 has taught them so far, and what responses are needed to end the pandemic and prepare for the next crisis.

SPEAKERS Agatha Bacelar leads Field Operations at Curative, one of the largest COVID-19 testing companies in the United States. Prior to joining Curative, she ran for U.S. Congress in San Francisco and spent five years at Emerson Collective. There she partnered with leading nonprofits, activists, artists, and policy-makers to advance education, immigration, criminal justice, and environmental reform. Agatha is a dual Brazilian-American citizen, founding member of the non-profit, Democracy Earth, and she studied product design engineering at Stanford.

Avital Balwit studies political and social thought and cognitive science at the University of Virginia. She wrote her capstone thesis on regulatory questions concerning the Big Five technology companies (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft) in the areas of privacy, antitrust, and taxation. She also writes short stories, personal essays, and poetry. She has work published in Kanstellation, and New Reader Magazine, and forthcoming in World Weaver Press. She won the Atlantic’s 2020 poetry contest.

Anton Korinek is an associate professor of economics at UVA’s Department of Economics and Darden School of Business and focuses his current research and teaching on the implications of artificial intelligence for business, for the economy and for the future of work. He studied economics, math and law at the University of Vienna and worked for several years at the intersection of IT and finance. After earning his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 2007, he worked on designing policy measures to prevent financial crises and developed an influential framework for capital flow regulation in emerging economies. He also analyzed when countries should coordinate their policy actions. His research has been published in top journals including the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Econometrics, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of International Economics and the Journal of Public Economics.

Ann Young Lee has almost 20 years of experience managing large scale humanitarian response and sustainable development programming across a variety of sectors: including emergency relief, community upgrading and infrastructure, livelihoods and economic growth, and local governance. Since 2016, she has served as the Chief Executive Officer of CORE (Community Organized Relief Effort), formerly J/P HRO, Sean Penn’s disaster relief charity. During that time, she has overseen the successful transition from a Haiti-based recovery organization to an international response and resilience- building NGO, responding to crises in Puerto Rico, across the Caribbean, in Latin America, and the continental United States. In her current role, Ms. Lee provides vision and strategic leadership for a comprehensive array of programs including reforestation, sustainable agriculture, education and youth development, community health, women’s entrepreneurship, and extensive rebuilding and reconstruction efforts. Additionally, in 2018, she launched a pioneering disaster preparedness training program, targeting young people from low- income communities of color in the US “Hurricane Belt.” On behalf of CORE, she has led high-level partnership with public and private stakeholders such as The World Bank, the United Nations, the Sean Parker Foundation, the Supreme Committee of Qatar, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, Salesforce, World Central Kitchen, and Airbnb.

Divya Siddarth works on building, testing, and studying impactful technology. Her work covers a broad range of applications in the intersection of technology and society, including digital work, political communication, digital security and privacy, and tech-augmented cooperation and collectivization. She is currently a Fellow at Microsoft Research India, and has done extensive fieldwork in urban and rural contexts, studying and implementing large-scale technology interventions for societal good. Her work has been published in the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the ACM Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies, and the ACM Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Development, and is forthcoming in Information, Communication, and Society. She has previously taught classes at Stanford University in both the computer science and political science departments, in collaboration with the Digital Civil Society Lab.