The White House issued a press release today (April 7, 2015) titled: FACT SHEET: Administration Announces Actions To Protect Communities From The Impacts Of Climate Change.
That press release reads in part:
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Unleashing Data: As part of the Administration’s Predict the Next Pandemic Initiative, in May 2015, an interagency working group co-chaired by OSTP, the CDC, and the Department of Defense will launch a pilot project to simulate efforts to forecast epidemics of dengue – a mosquito-transmitted viral disease affecting millions of people every year, including U.S. travelers and residents of the tropical regions of the U.S. such as Puerto Rico. The pilot project will consolidate data sets from across the federal government and academia on the environment, disease incidence, and weather, and challenge the research and modeling community to develop predictive models for dengue and other infectious diseases based on those datasets. In August 2015, OSTP plans to convene a meeting to evaluate resulting models and showcase this effort as a “proof-of-concept” for similar forecasting efforts for other infectious diseases.
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I tried finding more details on earlier workshops in this effort but limiting the search to “Predict the Next Pandemic Initiative” and the domain to “.gov,” I got two “hits.” One of which was the press release I cite above.
I sent a message (webform) to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy office and will update you with any additional information that arrives.
Of course my curiosity is about the means used to integrate the data sets. Once integrated, such data sets can be re-used, at least until it is time to integrate additional data sets. Bearing in mind that dirty data can lead to poor decision making, I would rather not duplicate the cleaning of data time after time.