The following is an announcement from the National Science Foundation. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has also been working in this space and recently published a 2020 Quadrennial Paper on Pandemic Informatics: Preparation, Robustness, and Resilience.
The Directorates for Biological Sciences (BIO); Computer Information Science and Engineering (CISE); Engineering (ENG); Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE); and the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE) at the National Science Foundation (NSF) are jointly supporting a series of interdisciplinary workshops to engage research communities around the topic of Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention. This topic arises both from fundamental scientific questions and pressing societal needs. Consequently, NSF is holding a series of virtual workshops that bring together interdisciplinary experts in the biological, engineering, computer, and social and behavioral sciences to start conversations and catalyze ideas on how to advance scientific understanding beyond state-of-the-art in pre-emergence and emergence forecasting, real-time monitoring, and detection of inflection point events in order to prevent and mitigate the occurrence of future pandemics. These goals will be met through integration of fundamental science and engineering advances related but not limited to: synergistic biological interactions spanning molecular, organismal, and epidemiological scales; computational algorithms and frameworks for intelligent processing, analyzing and modeling of data; multiscale smart bio-sensing technologies, networked sensors, in-situ computation; understanding disease transmission due to human social behavior and attitudes and the drivers underlying both. As per our mission, these NSF supported workshops will focus on the foundational knowledge and capabilities needed to inform future infectious disease outbreak prediction and pandemic prevention.
Each of these workshops is expected to have up to 50 invited active participants. The community can participate in a listen-only mode and interact through chat and Q&A functions.
Workshop 1: February 16-17, 2021
Description: Rapidly detect and assess the threat of emerging pathogens through advanced biosensing, surveillance, and the tracking of human and non-human populations for risk modeling and pandemic preparedness.
URL (for Agenda): thepipp.org
URL (for registration and participation): https://nsf.zoomgov.com/webinar/register/WN_rcYRemcZS9OkqPyKIxXkqA
Workshop 2: February 22-23, 2021
Description: Understanding of how the global behavior of an organism emerges from the interactions that begin occurring between components at the molecular, cellular, and physiological scales.
URL (for Agenda) prevent-symposium.org
URL (for registration and participation): https://nsf.zoomgov.com/webinar/register/WN_k0LBhQRqQc6Ue8pn6yKCVQ
Workshop 3: February 25-26, 2021
Description: Identification of pre-emergence and the predictions of rare events in multiscale, complex, dynamical systems.
URL (for Agenda): predictingpandemics.com
URL (for registration and participation): https://nsf.zoomgov.com/webinar/register/WN_XuW5oy-gSy261eE7es9c3w
Note: Additional workshops are currently being planned. Stay tuned.
