“Will Support Fundamental R&D That Transforms Ability to Forecast Pandemic-scale Events, Detect Outbreaks Early, and Respond Efficiently.” The COVID-19 pandemic had a devastating impact on the country, exposing our lack of preparedness and knowledge gaps in handling such events and understanding pathogens and disease emergence. NSF’s Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention (PIPP) initiative focuses on fundamental research and development activities needed to tackle grand challenges in infectious disease pandemics through prediction and prevention. The PIPP Phase II Centers Program builds upon Phase I Development Grant Program  to establish a network of centers or large-scale awards/investments that will support interdisciplinary team-based approaches to accelerate research and development activities in emerging infectious diseases and […]

The National Science Foundation announced a series of grants as a part of their new Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention (PIPP) program. The quick onset, mass devastation, and unpredictability of new strands and waves of contagion with COVID-19 taught us just how unprepared we were to face a global pandemic. Nearly $26 million in new awards will be used to support “high-risk, high-payoff convergent research that aims to identify, model, predict, track and mitigate the effects of future pandemics.” The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) wrote a series of white papers revolving around pandemic informatics. Published in November 2020, the first paper, Pandemic Informatics: Preparation, Robustness, and Resilience was part of […]

Bayer, the pharmaceutical company that owns big name brands such as Aspirin, Aleve, Midol, Cenesten and Iberogast, recently partnered with Ada Health, an AI-based assessment platform. This free app uses an AI chat robot to collect information on symptoms, patient history and other user targeted questions to generate data-driven suggestions for next steps and proper care. “Ada’s technology is based on a custom-built reasoning engine and a highly comprehensive medical knowledge base, covering thousands of conditions. In fact, in a recent vignettes study testing the eight most popular online symptom assessment apps, Ada was proven to have the most comprehensive condition coverage, providing a condition suggestion 99% of the time, […]

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 […]