The Situated Action approach to AI emphasizes the role of the environment in the generation and control of behavior; see (Norman 1993) for an introduction. Work to date has focused mainly on activity within spatially and temporally localized environments such as kitchens and video games (Agre & Chapman 1987; Agre & Horswill 1992). How useful is this perspective when larger-scale activities are ...

Disease outbreak detection, monitoring and notification systems play an important role in assessing threats to public health since disease outbreaks are becoming increasingly common world-wide. There are several systems in use around the world, with coverage of national, international and global disease outbreaks. These systems use different taxonomies and classifications for the detection and ...

The threat of bioterrorism has stimulated interest in enhancing public health surveillance to detect disease outbreaks more rapidly than is currently possible. To advance research on improving the timeliness of outbreak detection, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency sponsored the Bio-event Advanced Leading Indicator Recognition Technology (BioALIRT) project beginning in 2001. The purpo...

BACKGROUND Detecting outbreaks is a crucial task for public health officials, yet gaps remain in the systematic evaluation of outbreak detection protocols. The authors' objectives were to design, implement, and test a flexible methodology for generating detailed synthetic surveillance data that provides realistic geographical and temporal clustering of cases and use to evaluate outbreak detecti...

BACKGROUND Outbreak detection algorithms play an important role in effective automated surveillance. Although many algorithms have been designed to improve the performance of outbreak detection, few published studies have examined how epidemic features of infectious disease impact on the detection performance of algorithms. This study compared the performance of three outbreak detection algorit...

A system that monitors a region for a disease outbreak is called a disease outbreak surveillance system. A spatial surveillance system searches for patterns of disease outbreak in spatial subregions of the monitored region. A temporal surveillance system looks for emerging patterns of outbreak disease by analyzing how patterns have changed during recent periods of time. If a non-spatial, non-te...

Syndromic surveillance systems, especially software systems, have emerged as the leading outbreak detection mechanisms. Early outbreak detection systems can assist with medical and logistic decision support. One important concern for effectively testing these systems in practice is the scarcity of authentic outbreak health data. Because of this shortage, creating suitable geotemporal test clust...

In social networks, influence such as information, virus, innovations spreads from node to node through the edges of the networks. Understanding this diffusion process is the key to many important real-world applications, for example marketing strategies, virus and pollution control. The problem of outbreak detection and influence maximization ask about selecting a set of “important” nodes (sen...

The emergence of new infections and resurgence of old onesFhealth threats stemming from environmental contamination or purposeful acts of bioterrorismFcall for a worldwide effort in improving early outbreak detection, with the goal of ameliorating current and future risks. In some cases, the problem of outbreak detection is logistically straightforward and mathematically easy: a single case of ...