Intelligence and security informatics: biosurveillance

The 2007 NSF BioSurveillance Workshop (BioSurveillance 2007) was built on the success of the first NSF BioSurveillance Workshop, hosted by the University of Arizona’s NSF BioPortal Center in March 2006. BioSurveillance 2007 brought - gether infectious disease informatics (IDI) researchers and practitioners to discuss selected topics directly relevant to data sharing and analysis for real-time animal and public health surveillance. These researchers and practitioners represented a wide range of backgrounds including but not limited to epidemiology, statistics, applied mathematics, information systems, computer science and machine learning/data mining. BioSurveillance 2007 aimed to achieve the following objectives: (a) review and examine various real-time data sharing approaches for animal and public health s- veillance from both technological and policy perspectives; (b) identify key technical challenges facing syndromic surveillance for both animal and human diseases, and discuss and compare related systems approaches and algorithms; and (c) provide a forum to bring together IDI researchers and practitioners to identify future research opportunities. We are pleased that we received many outstanding contributions from IDI research groups and practitioners from around the world. The one-day program included one invited presentation, 17 long papers, six short papers, and two posters. BioSurveillance 2007 was jointly hosted by: the University of Arizona; University of California, Davis; Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; and the University of Washington.