Can you help identify biothreats in real time?
Congratulations to winner Pandemic Pulse and runner-up Pre-syndromic Surveillance!
Schedule
- Call for Stage 1 SubmissionsOctober 17, 2017
- Stage 1 Submission DeadlineDecember 4, 2017
- Stage 1 Finalists AnnouncedFebruary 14, 2018
- Stage 2 Virtual AcceleratorFebruary - April 2018
- current stageStage 2 Winners AnnouncedMay 30, 2018
Finalists
Commuter Pattern Analysis
A system that cross-references de-identified traffic information with existing municipal health data and internet keyword searches. The tool will be developed to recognize commuter absenteeism to flag a possible disease outbreak.Monitoring Emergency Department Wait Times to Detect Emergent Influenza Pandemics
A model that alerts authorities of spikes in emergency room wait times that can be attributed to emergent flu pandemics. The solution sources real-time data from a network of 142 hospitals in 19 states and is updated hourly, allowing agencies to quickly intervene.One Health Alert System
A symptoms database that analyzes the Daily Disease Report’s top ten symptoms as seen by 43 health care providers in North Carolina. The model flags disease outbreak using textual predictive analytics and accounts for seasonal rates of change.Pandemic Pulse
A tool that integrates six data streams to detect bio-threat signals. Twitter, Google Search Trends, transportation alerts, news streams, and HealthMap data provide a baseline pulse of the community. Should an anomalous signal be detected, a secondary set of surveillance tools are deployed, including live transportation data and participatory cohorts such as Flu Near You.Pre-Syndromic Surveillance
A machine learning system that overlays real-time emergency room chief complaint data with social media and news data using the semantic scan, a novel approach to text analysis. The model detects emerging clusters of rare disease cases that do not correspond to known syndrome types.
About The Challenge
With the Hidden Signals Challenge, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science & Technology Directorate (S&T), in collaboration with the Office of Health Affairs National Biosurveillance Integration Center, has called upon data innovators from a wide variety of fields—from data science, to civic tech, to epidemiology—to develop concepts for novel uses of existing data that will identify signals and achieve timelier alerts for biothreats in our cities and communities.
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Awards
TOTAL PRIZE POOL
$300,000
Prizes awarded under this competition will be paid by electronic funds transfer and may be subject to Federal income taxes.
Judges
full bioMatthew Davenport, PHD
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
full bioRanu Dhillon, MD
Earth Institute, Columbia University
full bioThomas McGinn, DVM
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
full bioEric Moore, PHD
Edgewood Chemical Biological Center
full bioGary Schenkel
Chicago Office of Emergency Management
full bioIda Sim, MD, PHD, FACMI
University of California San Francisco
full bioSheila van Cuyk, PHD
U.S. Department of Homeland Security