19 Apr
2004
19 Apr
'04
9:45 a.m.
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Research Workshop in Applied Statistics
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Join us this Wednesday (April 21) at noon,
at CBRSS, the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences,
34 Kirkland Street, Room 22, for
"BACTrack: A System for Rapid Detection and Spatio-Temporal Localization of
Biological Agent Attacks"
Our speaker will be Ronald Hoffeld of MIT's Lincoln Laboratories.
ABSTRACT
Syndromic surveillance systems can generally be improved by inclusion of
patient location information. This information is difficult to obtain from
health care providers due to HIPAA privacy restrictions. Recent trends in
location-based cell phone services indicate that the location histories of
phone subscribers may become available on a voluntary basis. Coupling these
data with individuals self-reported coarse health status (i.e. sick or
healthy) suggests a new health surveillance technique. This technique,
which we call BACTrack for Biological Agent Correlation Tracker, searches
for spatial temporal regions in which a larger than expected percentage of
the population became infected. The unique aspect of this search is that it
uses current health status information with past location history data.
This talk will give the results of a study we conducted to determine the
operating characteristics of this detection technique. Included will be a
description of the system concept, implementation approaches, detection
algorithms, and estimates of performance.
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As always, lunch will be provided.
Contact information, the current schedule, and previous presentations may be
found at the course web site: http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~gov3009/
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The Research Workshop in Applied Statistics is a forum for graduate
students, faculty, and visiting scholars to present and discuss work
in progress and exchange ideas. It is intended as a tour of Harvard's
statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in
different disciplines such as economics, epidemiology, medicine,
political science, psychology, public policy, public health, sociology
and statistics. The topics of papers presented in previous years
included missing data, survey analysis, Bayesian simulation, sample
selection, and models for election and portfolio choice. Faculty and
student participants in the workshop present their current projects,
and guest speakers also give occasional presentations. The workshop
provides an excellent opportunity for informal interaction between
graduate students and faculty from a variety of disciplines. Course
credit is available for students as either an upper-level Government
or Sociology class. Lunch is provided.
If you are interested, note that all events are held at noon, in Room 22,
Center for Basic Research in Social Sciences (CBRSS, 34 Kirkland St., this is
the yellow building across the street from William James Hall).
Contact information and previous presentations may be found at the course web
site: http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~gov3009/
To join the gov3009 mailing list, send e-mail to
gov3009-l-request(a)fas.harvard.edu with the following text message:
subscribe
end