Invited to speak at the BioHack Village at DEF CON 26, Prof. Debra Laefer continued the Urban Modeling Group’s tradition of engagement with potential collaborators from a diversity of disciplines, including macrogenomics and bio hacking, when she spoke at the event last Friday, August 10th in Las Vegas. Prof. Laefer’s talk, Remote Sensing, Distributed Computing, BigData and 3D Epidemiology: Today’s Public Health Opportunity, focussed on ways that 3D spatial data can revolutionize our understanding of environmental DNA and disease pathology, particularly in urban environments.
Abstract: Recent advances in remote sensing, drones, distributed computing, bigdata, and environmental DNA offer an unprecedented opportunity to push epidemiology beyond its traditional, two-dimensional (i.e. map-based) approach and harness the full availability and power of three-dimensional data and novel investigation methods to explore such data. This talk will present an extremely technology-specific vision for achieving this. Examples of the potential usefulness of this approach will be demonstrated with respect to three scenarios: (1) avian flu, (2) asthma, and post-flooding fecal contamination. The current state of the art of the component technologies will be presented as well as the remaining challenges for their seamless integration