Biosurveillance and Biosecurity

The 2008 Biosurveillance and Biosecurity Workshop (BioSecure 2008) was built on the success of the two U. S. National Science Foundation-sponsored Biosurveillance Workshops. The inaugural 2006 workshop was hosted by the University of Arizona's NSF BioPortal Center. It attracted more than 35 participants from academic insti- tions, industry, and public health agencies, and achieved its objective of bringing together 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. The 2007 meeting was held in New Brunswick, New J- sey, co-located with the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and - curity Informatics, and met with tremendous success. Researchers from a wide range of backgrounds, including biosecurity, epidemiology, statistics, applied mathematics, information systems, computer science and machine learning/data mining, contributed formal papers to the workshop and actively participated in the meeting along with practitioners from both government agencies and industry. More than 65 people - tended the one-day workshop, representing major research labs across multiple dis- plines, key industry players, and a range of government entities. BioSecure 2008 continued this workshop series aiming to achieve the following objectives: (a) review and examine various informatics approaches for health surve- lance and biosecurity from both technological and policy perspectives; and (b) discuss and compare various systems approaches and algorithms of relevance to biosurve- lance and biosecurity.