CBER External Seminar - Professor Simon Frost, Microsoft, US

Abstract: Through a network of robotic sensing platforms coupled with cloud-computing analytics, Microsoft Premonition (http://microsoft.com/premonition) aims to continuously monitor the environment to detect potential pathogens before they cause outbreaks. I will discuss how we have developed 'biological weather stations' that lure and autonomously identify mosquito species in real time using artificial intelligence, some of the challenges in both hardware and software in developing a connected platform, and early results from deploying these devices in the field in the United States and Nepal. I will demonstrate how mosquitoes may be considered as ‘flying syringes’ to conduct surveillance not only of vector-borne and mosquito-specific viruses, but also xenosurveillance of emerging viruses through metagenomics. Cloud-based analytics of epidemiological data in addition to genomic data can also be used to provide real-time insights into epidemiological trends, such as seasonal and spatial hotspots of infectious diseases such as West Nile Virus and Lassa Fever, as well as insights into ecological trends in insect communities that may be impacted by climate change.