PyData Global talk covering tools from geometry/topology and their uses in public health, public policy, and social good initiatives. Examples include food price prediction, COVID policies, public health interventions, and fair AI.

1. GEOMETRY FOR
SOCIAL GOOD
Colleen M. Farrelly

2. Who am I?
◦ Author of forthcoming book, The
Shape of Data
◦ Former public health practitioner
◦ Researcher on spatial and temporal
analytics
◦ Miami sociologist and advocate

3. THE TOOLS

4. Persistent Homology
◦ From a branch of math called topology that
deals with global properties of an object
◦ Creates series of distance-based objects
(simplicial complexes)
◦ Tracks features across series
◦ Can be used to compare data over time,
geography, or samples
◦ Easy-to-visualize plots for each feature-tracking
dataset
◦ Connection to Euler Characteristic

5. Forman-
Ricci
Curvature
◦ Network science
metric
◦ Measures
curvature on a
graph
◦ Tug of hubs and
connections on a
vertex
◦ Very useful for
understanding
change points over
space and time

6. Generative AI and
Diffusion Methods
◦ Deep learning algorithm that can couple
with diffusion to evolve a picture or
image
◦ Deep neural network architecture to create
an image from text
◦ Differential equation/geometry algorithms
to evolve the image to the artist’s liking
◦ Finding popularity in art and generation of
educational material

7. APPLICATIONS

8. Persistent Homology
◦ Finding urban growth tipping points
◦ Infrastructure, public health, environmental
issues
◦ Tracking climate change
◦ Avoiding points of no return
◦ Finding change points in epidemic case growth
◦ Resource allocation

9. Forman-Ricci
Curvature
◦ Food price crisis tracking over
markets across Burkina Faso
◦ Ebola models across DRCongo
2018 outbreak
◦ Tipping populations into healthy
behavior

10. Generative AI
◦ Public Health
Education
◦ Mask
campaigns
◦ Vaccination
campaigns
◦ Infant
nutrition
campaigns
◦ HIV education

11. THE NEED FOR REPRESENTATION

12. Good Resources
◦ Persistent Homology
◦ TDAstats or TDApplied in R
◦ Persim or Giotto in Python
◦ Forman-Ricci curvature
◦ Contact me on LinkedIn for code: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleenmfarrelly/
◦ Text-to-Image
◦ NightCafe
◦ OpenAI’s DALL-E