Biosurveillance-based Integrated Outbreak Warning And Recognition System (BIOWARS)

Seemingly unrelated events occurring over time in different parts of the world may culminate in a biological attack on U.S. Armed Forces overseas or at home. However, having information about these events is like obtaining parts of a million-piece jigsaw puzzle without the underlying picture. To be able to take large volumes of such structured and unstructured information and discover an event pattern and the underlying ground truth so as to warn our troops in time and save their lives along with the lives of innocent unintended targets requires a comprehensive, robust, adaptive technology that complements human intelligence rather than replace it. We propose to design and develop an adaptive system for automated discovery of disease outbreaks. This system will provide innovative mechanisms to rapidly discover emerging bio-threat situations and early signs of a potential disease outbreak through syndromic surveillance. The proposed approach integrates intelligent knowledge discovery techniques to facilitate robust and cost-effective threat detection through multi-source information fusion. The main product of this project is the Biosurveillance-based Integrated Outbreak Warning And Recognition System (BIOWARS), an agent-based system that facilitates automated support early detection of emerging threats and potential disease outbreaks.