Exciting new possibilities for collaboration on Big Data opening up between Imperial College, ProMED and ISID

End of April saw the first meeting of an exciting new collaboration between Imperial’s Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU) in Healthcare Associated Infection (HCAI) and Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), the Antimicrobial Research Collaborative (ARC@Imperial), the Data Science Institute (DSI) and ProMED (Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases), International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID).

Professor Lawrence Madoff, Editor of ProMED-mail watching presentation built on ProMED data

ProMED is the largest global infection surveillance dataset and provides information on emerging infectious disease to aid outbreak control.

Professor Alison Holmes hosted the visit by Professor Lawrence Madoff, Editor of ProMED-mail and Dr Britta Lassmann, Programme Director for ISID to foster opportunities to collaborate with Imperial College. 

Dr David Birch presenting to ISID and ProMED

Current collaborative work led by Dr Ceire Costelloe, NIHR Career Development Fellow and Lecturer at HPRU in HCAI and AMR and Dr David Birch, Research Associate at the DSI was presented alongside novel visualisations using global ProMED data.

The Data Science Institute exists to act as a focal point for data driven research at Imperial College and its KPMG Data Observatory provides a unique facility for the social exploration of Big Data using high resolution immersive visualisation.

This collaboration represents a unique opportunity to merge surveillance datasets with cutting edge visualisation methods to provide information on big data in a digestible format that enables hypothesis generation, and can help understand infection transmission.