Background. Foodborne disease is estimated to cause 48 million illnesses annually in the US resulting in 3000 deaths [1]. Although most infections occur as sporadic cases, outbreak surveillance offers valuable insight about the foods and pathogens responsible for illnesses [2]. A total of 1632 foodborne disease outbreaks were reported during 20112012 [3] and recent data indicates an overall dec...

Twitter provides the freshest source of data about what is happening in the lives people across the world. The publicly available streams of status updates available on Twitter have been used to track earthquakes, forest fires and most especially flu outbreaks. Current techniques for tracking flu outbreaks rely on count data for a number of keywords. However, count data alone on the noisy Twitt...

Influence Maximization and outbreak detection are two problems that have seen massive research in recent years, for good reason. For example, targeted tweets by well-selected Twitter users can lead to massive reshares, resulting in a quick dissemination of information. Well-placed sensors can allow contamination in a water pipeline network to be detected quickly. Although the two problems may s...

HEALTH SURVEILLANCE CAN BE VIEWED AS AN ONGOING SYSTEMATIC COLLECTION, ANALYSIS, AND INTERPRETATION OF DATA FOR USE IN PLANNING, IMPLEMENTATION, AND EVALUATION OF A GIVEN HEALTH SYSTEM, IN POTENTIALLY MULTIPLE SPHERES (EX: animal, human, environment). As we move into a sophisticated technologically advanced era, there is a need for cost-effective and efficient health surveillance methods and sy...

BACKGROUND Livestock herds are interconnected with each other via an intricate network of transports of animals which represents a potential substrate for the spread of epidemic diseases. We analysed four years (2012-2015) of daily bovine transports to assess the risk of disease transmission and identify times and locations where monitoring would be most effective. Specifically, we investigated...