DELVE 2016
Organizers:
Daniela Paolotti, ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
Michele Tizzoni, ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
Alex Vespignani, Northeastern University, Boston, USA
The ability to rapidly recognize and respond to both global and local health threats remains a critical public health priority. The ever-growing digital world represents an unprecedented opportunity to harvest for new solutions and tools to face these emergencies. This digital means of disease and, more in general, health-related information detection has been made possible by the growing influence of Internet technology, which has significantly changed the landscape of public health surveillance and epidemic intelligence gathering. On the other hand, disease and outbreak data is now disseminated not only through formal online announcements by government agencies, but also through other informal digital channels such as social networking sites, blogs, chat rooms, Web searches, local news media, crowdsourcing platforms. These informal data streams have been credited with decreasing the time between an outbreak and formal recognition of an outbreak, allowing for an expedited response to the public health threat. The very recent addition of data from smart wearable body sensors for health self-assessment allows also to collect health-related data from the general public on a broader perspective not necessarily disease-related. Collectively, these online sources create an image of global public health that is fundamentally different from the one produced by traditional public health surveillance infrastructure. As these sources become more widely used and relied upon, it is imperative that health professionals collaborate to demonstrate and improve the effectiveness of these sources and to identify strengths and weaknesses that can be capitalized upon and remedied.
The goal of this workshop is to gather experts from many diverse fields such as physics, computer science, biology, epidemiology, public health, information technologies, social science to explore novel data streams and new technologies for global health threats, identify and discuss strengths and weaknesses in surveillance methods, promote critique and development of already existing surveillance tools and, last but not least, characterise the emerging field of Digital Epidemiology in terms of all the common issues it has with Science of Complexity.
Daniela Paolotti, ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
Michele Tizzoni, ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
Alex Vespignani, Northeastern University, Boston, USA
The ability to rapidly recognize and respond to both global and local health threats remains a critical public health priority. The ever-growing digital world represents an unprecedented opportunity to harvest for new solutions and tools to face these emergencies. This digital means of disease and, more in general, health-related information detection has been made possible by the growing influence of Internet technology, which has significantly changed the landscape of public health surveillance and epidemic intelligence gathering. On the other hand, disease and outbreak data is now disseminated not only through formal online announcements by government agencies, but also through other informal digital channels such as social networking sites, blogs, chat rooms, Web searches, local news media, crowdsourcing platforms. These informal data streams have been credited with decreasing the time between an outbreak and formal recognition of an outbreak, allowing for an expedited response to the public health threat. The very recent addition of data from smart wearable body sensors for health self-assessment allows also to collect health-related data from the general public on a broader perspective not necessarily disease-related. Collectively, these online sources create an image of global public health that is fundamentally different from the one produced by traditional public health surveillance infrastructure. As these sources become more widely used and relied upon, it is imperative that health professionals collaborate to demonstrate and improve the effectiveness of these sources and to identify strengths and weaknesses that can be capitalized upon and remedied.
The goal of this workshop is to gather experts from many diverse fields such as physics, computer science, biology, epidemiology, public health, information technologies, social science to explore novel data streams and new technologies for global health threats, identify and discuss strengths and weaknesses in surveillance methods, promote critique and development of already existing surveillance tools and, last but not least, characterise the emerging field of Digital Epidemiology in terms of all the common issues it has with Science of Complexity.
LocationBeurs Van Berlage, Amsterdam, Netherlands
The workshop will be a Satellite of the Conference on Complex Systems 2016 - CCS2016 Contact: daniela [dot] paolotti [at] isi [dot] it |