Keynote #3: AI for Public Health: Epidemic Forecasting Through a Data-Centric Lens

Epidemic forecasting is a crucial tool for public health decision making and planning. There is, however, a limited understanding of how epidemics spread, largely due to other complex dynamics, most notably social and pathogen dynamics. With the increasing availability of real-time multimodal data, a new opportunity has emerged for capturing previously unobservable facets of the spatiotemporal dynamics of epidemics. In this regard, my work brings a data-centric perspective to public health via methodological advances in AI at the intersection of time series analysis, spatiotemporal mining, scientific ML, and multi-agent systems. Toward realizing the potential of AI in public health, I addressed multiple challenges stemming from the domain such as data scarcity, distributional changes, and issues arising from real-time deployment to enable our support of CDC’s COVID-19 response. This talk will overview our developments to address these challenges with novel deep learning architectures for real-time response to disease outbreaks and new techniques for end-to-end learning with mechanistic epidemiological models—based on differential equations and agent-based models—that bridge ML advances and traditional domain knowledge to leverage individual merits.