Infectious Disease Informatics and Biosurveillance

This book on Infectious Disease Informatics (IDI) and biosurveillance is intended to provide an integrated view of the current state of the art, identify technical and policy challenges and opportunities, and promote cross-disciplinary research that takes advantage of novel methodology and what we have learned from innovative applications. This book also fills a systemic gap in the literature by emphasizing informatics driven perspectives (e.g., information system design, data standards, computational aspects of biosurveillance algorithms, and system evaluation). Finally, this book attempts to reach policy makers and practitioners through the clear and effective communication of recent research findings in the context of case studies in IDI and biosurveillance, providing “hands-on” in-depth opportunities to practitioners to increase their understanding of value, applicability, and limitations of technical solutions. This book collects the state of the art research and modern perspectives of distinguished individuals and research groups on cutting-edge IDI technical and policy research and its application in biosurveillance. The contributed chapters are grouped into three units. Unit I provides an overview of recent biosurveillance research while highlighting the relevant legal and policy structures in the context of IDI and biosurveillance ongoing activities. It also identifies IDI data sources while addressing information collection, sharing, and dissemination issues as well as ethical considerations. Unit II contains survey chapters on the types of surveillance methods used to analyze IDI data in the context of public health and bioterrorism. Specific computational techniques covered include: text mining, time series analysis, multiple data streams methods, ensembles of surveillance methods, spatial analysis and visualization, social network analysis, and agent-based simulation. Unit III examines IT and decision support for public health event responseand bio-defense. Practical lessons learned in developing public health and biosurveillance systems, technology adoption, and syndromic surveillance for large events are discussed. The goal of this book is to provide an understandable interdisciplinary IDI and biosurveillance reference either used as a standalone textbook or reference for students, researchers, and practitioners in public health, veterinary medicine, biostatistics, information systems, computer science, and public administration and policy.

Carlos Castillo-Chavez is a Regents Professor, and Joaquin Bustoz Jr. Professor of Mathematical Biology at Arizona State University and the executive director of the Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute and Institute for Strengthening the Understanding of Mathematics and Science at the same university. He has won awards by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mentor Award and Fellow (2007), the Stanislaw M. Ulam Distinguished Scholar by the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory (2003), the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) Distinguished Scientist Award (2001), the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (1997), and the Presidential Faculty Fellowship Award from the National Science Foundation and the Office of the President of the United States (1992-1997). Dr. Hsinchun Chen is McClelland Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona and Andersen Consulting Professor of the Year (1999). He received the B.S. degree from the National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan, the MBA degree from SUNY Buffalo, and the Ph.D. degree in Information Systems from the New York University. He is author/editor of 10 books and more than 130 SCI journal articles covering intelligence analysis, biomedical informatics, data/text/web mining, digital library, knowledge management, and Web computing. His recent books include: Medical Informatics: Knowledge Management and Data Mining in Biomedicine and Intelligence and Security Informatics for International Security: Information Sharing and Data Mining, both published by Springer. Dr. Chen was ranked #8 in publication productivity in Information Systems (CAIS 2005) and #1 in Digital Library research (IP&M 2005) in two recent bibliometric studies. He serves on ten editorial boards including: ACM Transactions on Information Systems, ACM Journal on Educational Resources in Computing, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Decision Support Systems, and International Journal on Digital Library. Dr. Chen is a Scientific Counselor/Advisor of the National Library of Medicine (USA), Academia Sinica (Taiwan), and National Library of China (China), and has served as an advisor for major NSF, DOJ, NLM, and other international research programs in digital library, digital government, medical informatics, and national security research. Dr. Chen is founding director of Artificial Intelligence Lab and Hoffman E-Commerce Lab. The UA Artificial Intelligence Lab, which houses 40+ researchers, has received more than $17M in research funding from NSF, NIH, NLM, DOJ, CIA, and other agencies over the past 15 years. The Hoffman E-Commerce Lab, which has been funded mostly by major IT industry partners, features one of the most advanced e-commerce hardware and software environments in the College of Management. Dr. Chen is conference co-chair of ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2004 and has served as the conference/program co-chair for the past eight International Conferences of Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL), the premiere digital library meeting in Asia that he helped develop. Dr. Chen is also (founding) conference co-chair of the IEEE International Conferences on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI) 2003-2006. The ISI conference, which has been sponsored by NSF, CIA, DHS, and NIJ, has become the premiere meeting for international and homeland security IT research. Dr. Chen’s COPLINK system, which has been quoted as a national model for public safety information sharing and analysis, has been adopted in more than 150 law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The COPLINK research had been featured in New York Times, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, among others. The COPLINK project was selected as a finalist by the prestigious International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP)/Motorola 2003 Weaver Seavey Award for Quality in Law Enforcement in 2003. COPLINK research has recently been expanded to border protection (BorderSafe), disease and bioagent surveillance (BioPortal), and terrorism informatics research (Dark Web), funded by NSF, CIA, and DHS. Dr. Chen has also received numerous awards in information technology and knowledge management education and research including: AT&T Foundation Award, SAP Award, the Andersen Consulting Professor of the Year Award, the University of Arizona Technology Innovation Award, and the National Chaio-Tung University Distinguished Alumnus Award. Dr. Chen is an IEEE Fellow. William B. Lober MD MS is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington (UW) in the Schools of Nursing, Medicine, and Public Health & Community Medicine. Dr Lober directs the UW Clinical Informatics Research Group, which focuses on the development, integration, and evaluation of information systems to support individual and population health. His academic interests include information system-based surveillance; web-based information systems; support of population-based research in public health and biomedical research; computer supported collaborative work; and privacy and security. Dr Lober is a board member of the International Society for Disease Surveillance, is a chief editor of Advances in Disease Surveillance, and was the organizing chair of the 2005 Syndromic Surveillance Conference. He graduated from the UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Medical Program, trained in Emergency Medicine at University of Arizona, is EM board certified, and completed a National Library of Medicine fellowship in Medical Informatics. In addition to his clinical training, he has a BSEE in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University and 10 years of industry experience in hardware and software engineering. Dr. Mark Thurmond is currently professor of epidemiology in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis. He is Co-Director of the Center for Animal Disease Modeling and head of the FMD Lab. He first became involved with livestock as a young boy growing up in Northern California where he raised beef cattle. He has 34 years of experience in veterinary medicine, including clinical practice in dairy cattle, international programs in tropical veterinary medicine and education, and teaching and research in infectious diseases of livestock. His teaching includes epidemiologic methodology, infectious disease modeling, surveillance, foreign animal diseases, and infectious diseases of cattle. Past research includes work on the epidemiology of bovine abortion, bovine leukemia virus, bovine virus diarrhea virus, neosporosis, and vesicular stomatitis. Since 1997, his research has focused on global epidemiology and modeling of foot-and-mouth disease. These efforts have contributed to an understanding of the conceptual foundations for FMD surveillance and for the prospects of FMD transmission within California, rates of intra-herd transmission of FMD, and regional and global risks of FMD. Dr. Daniel Zeng received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, and the B.S. degree in economics and operations research from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China. Currently, he is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Intelligent Systems and Decisions Laboratory in the Department of Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona. His research interests include security informatics, infectious disease informatics, spatio-temporal data analysis, software agents and their applications, computational support for auctions and negotiations, and recommender systems. He has co-edited three books and published about 60 peer-reviewed articles in Management Information Systems and Computer Science journals, edited books, and conference proceedings. He received two best paper awards and two teaching awards in the past six years. He also serves on editorial boards of five Information Technology-related journals and is currently editing several special topic issues for major IEEE publications. He is active in MIS and IEEE professional organizations and conference activities and is Vice President for Technical Activities for the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society. He is also Vice President for Academic Activities, Chinese Association for Science and Technology (CAST-USA), a national professional organization.