Epidemic modelling of multiple virus strains: a case study of SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7 in Moscow

During a long-running pandemic a pathogen can mutate, producing new strains with different epidemiological parameters. Existing approaches to epidemic modelling only consider one virus strain. We have developed a modified SEIR model to simulate multiple virus strains within the same population. As a case study, we investigate the potential effects of SARS-CoV-2 strain B.1.1.7 on the city of Moscow. Our analysis indicates a high risk of a new wave of infections in September-October 2021 with up to 35 000 daily infections at peak. We open-source our code and data.

Hotel Recognition via Latent Image Embedding

We approach the problem of hotel recognition with deep metric learning. We overview the existing approaches and propose a modification to Contrastive loss called Contrastive-Triplet loss. We construct a robust pipeline for benchmarking metric learning models and perform experiments on Hotels-50K and CUB200 datasets. Contrastive-Triplet loss is shown to achieve better retrieval on Hotels-50k. We open-source our code.