Hello Fellow Forecasters,

My name is Nikos Bosse and I am a Community Shaper for the FluSight Forecasting Tournament, which means that I'll have moderator powers on the forecasting questions within it, and I'll be here to launch new questions, respond to comments and hopefully point forecasters in the direction of helpful resources as the tournament unfolds.

I am currently pursuing a PhD in epidemiology and infectious disease forecasting at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. My work mostly focuses on a) forecast evaluation and b) comparing human forecasters and model-based predictions. I've worked a lot on forecasting COVID-19 and am excited to support this work on forecasting Flu hospitalizations!

Together with the team of Thomas McAndrew at Lehigh University we are going to make the most of the invaluable forecasts you provide. Your forecasts will not only help inform policies of the Centres of Disease Control (CDC), but will also be the basis of a few exciting research problems. We will be looking at how Metaculus forecasts perform against other forecasting models submitted by several other research institutions. We are also going to explore how well we can combine human forecasts and model-based predictions to powerful ensembles. 

For this tournament, I would also like to try a small experiment: Are we, as a community of forecasters, able to collaborate on forecasting models? To find out I created [this Google Colab Notebook](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1nUpjeSPGAyJiZuz7okzV2JcFXJ2WAjMO#scrollTo=TWJr_cT3bvyd). It is written in the statistical programming language R and you are invited to have a look, edit and contribute code! You can find an introduction to Google Colab [here](https://colab.research.google.com/#). 

I’m very happy answer your questions and respond to your comments about anything related to this tournament or about infetious disease forecasting in general. My username is nikos and you can also email me at nikos{@at}metaculus.com. 

Happy forecasting!

Nikos