I was recruited by a global group of volunteers developing a novel, privacy-preserving COVID-19 contact tracing app and research platform. The tool was designed in a way that anonymyzed and encrypted individual location and device data, and allowed for computations on data that never revealed any personally identifying information. In addition to informing users of potential contacts with infected individuals, the backend platfrom was designed to allow for research on the data without comprimising privacy. I worked on epidemiological models and tools, and I led the frontend software development team. On that team, I coded many of the tools used for the mobile app and website, worked on the privacy model, and prepared two white papers.
I left the project in May due to other commitments and the project recently ended due to lack of funding. However, I learned about privacy models, including multi-party computation, and how to effectively collaborate with other software developers and project managers.