The recent Ebola virus disease outbreak in West Africa has been a terrible reminder of the necessities of rapid evaluation and response to emerging infectious disease threats. For such response to be fully informed, complex epidemiological data including dates of symptom onsets, locations of the cases, hospitalisation, and contact tracing information have to be analysed in near real time. Unfortunately, some of the tools required to bridge the gap between data collection in regional offices and advanced statistical modelling are still lacking.
Hackout 3 will aim to reduce this gap by bringing together field epidemiologists, decision
makers, modellers and computer scientists to create free, open-source resources for the real-time
monitoring of disease outbreaks. While new developments will largely build upon recent progresses
for epidemics analysis using the R software, other technologies will also be considered, including
existing tools for data collection (e.g. EpiInfo VHF), graph databases (Neo4j) and interactive,
web-based graphs (e.g. htmlwidgets, shiny, google charts).
We are assembling an exciting team of people interested in developing the next generation of tools for outbreak response, including modellers, statisticians, developers and public health workers.
Note: this list will be growing over the next few days as participants are being confirmed. The event should involve 30-40 people in total.
National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (The Netherlands)
// websiteNational Institute for Public Health and the Environment (The Netherlands) & Leiden University Medical Center
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Hackout 3 will be hosted at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. Follow the official directions, or see the map below:
Accommodation
Funded participants will be hosted at the DoubleTree Hilton Hotel in the Marina, Berkeley. The hotel is about 10-15 min by taxi to the venue.
Hackout 3 will be a five-days event, including a first day of brainstorming, leaving most of the rest of the time for developing tools, discussing methods, and testing new approaches. The Wednesday afternoon will be free, with possibility of a group hike for participants interested in seeing a bit of the nature surrounding Berkeley.
Programme:
Every day will start with breakfast at 9-10am and finish at 6pm. Lunch will be served around 12:30.
We are extremely grateful to our sponsors for this third instance of Hackout.
Hackout 3 is co-supported by:
