The Economist (again!), Fuse, and Chris Blow

Once again the Technology Quarterly section of the Economist has selected a focus on InSTEDD and our work in Asia, this time for sensors, sensitivity, and the use of mobile devices for data collection. The pleasant face you see on the GeoChat screenshot that opens the article is our Vice President for Engineering, Eduardo Jezierski, working within our Innovation Laboratory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. More on the Lab below.

The article (which you can find here) quotes several informed and articulate sources, including staff at MIT and Path Intelligence, regarding the usefulness of mobile devices in general and our approach to data collection in particular. From my reading it's a fairly nice validation of our design and methods.

Incidentally, speaking of design and methods, many of you know we have a mesh synchronization tool called Mesh4x. It's getting used all over, from African medical clinics to the US Centers for Disease Control, but it's a programming tool, not really usable by ordinary folk.

However, we'll soon be talking more about our new Mesh4x interface client, Fuse, that will take our mesh synchronization capabilities and make them visible, intuitive, and usable by anyone who knows where their data resides. Mesh4x, our code library, works beautifully (we find a minor bug every few months and fix it) but it's been a developer's tool. Fuse will change that. Soon anyone will be able to specify an Excel spreadsheet here on my laptop, an Oracle database there on your server, a Google Earth KML layer on that PDA, a Microsoft Access table over in Atlanta, a MySQL database on your website's LAMP stack, and then press the Big Red Squishy Button that says "SYNC" and they'll all synchronize with each other across applications and across devices. I've watched pieces of that happen today and it's lovely to see. Even better is that, if access to the internet is broken or missing, it all can happen just over a stream of SMS text messages from a cellphone connected to a laptop. No internet at all.

This is very useful magic.

The Fuse synchronization interface design has to be very simple. Like all magic, that simplicity will mask a daunting complexity. One of the very talented people looking over the design of the Fuse interface is the remarkable Chris Blow. Chris has done beautiful work for our valued Ushahidi colleagues in the Open Mobile Consortium and he's now working within our Innovation Laboratory in Cambodia. Chris - a very impressive intelligence indeed - is just visiting InSTEDD, but while he's with us he's helping the Cambodian lab students learn techniques that will let them design user interfaces that make sense for their Cambodian customers. Take a look at his blog here.

Days like this are a part of the reason I love this organization. Yes, we're doing very good humanitarian work, using free and open source information tools that really surpass anything I'm seeing in the commercial sector, but what's really happening is that networks of truly remarkable people are forming around seriously hard problems facing the planet. Smart, passionate, selfless, creative people are finding a rewarding outlet for their need to be of service to humanity. Nice example of the Buddhist goal of "Right Livelihood".

InSTEDD in a very brief TV interview on Fox

This morning started very early, with a live Fox Business News interview about InSTEDD that you can view here. The interview was done within the fascinating Computer History Museum just off the Google Campus in Mountain View, and really, really early in the morning.

Fox was apparently pleased with the few minutes and the producer of Fox Business, Gary Kaye, came up afterwards to request a little more interview time in the future. He said he was surprised to see such an effective combination of tech and humanitarian support and wanted to know more. Stay tuned.

(Again, the link is here.)

Eric

A brief (but useful!) Fact Sheet about InSTEDD

Wow. Over the past few weeks, interest in InSTEDD and in our tools: GeoChat, Mesh4x, Evolve, and the Innovation Lab, with a slew of additional integration requests to our advisory staff, have each really taken off. We find we're receiving about a four requests a week for some sort of work somewhere in the world. Over the past few days, for example, we've had conversations about opportunities in Israel, Pakistan, Georgia (the one next to Belarus, not the one with peaches), Italy, and Tajikistan.

To get a jump start on some of these conversations, and to wrap our description into a neater package, we've developed a Fact Sheet. It's brief, just a two-pager, plus a page around a few of our achievements. To keep it brief we've minimized some of the very cool work being done by Taha Kass-Hout in Atlanta, and the separate work being done by Romdoul Kim and the Innovation Lab team in Cambodia, but it's enough to get the flavor of our skills.

Please feel free to download the Fact Sheet here, and don't hesitate to contact me, or anyone at InSTEDD, if there is some project you think might be interesting for us to do together. We're always watching for useful humanitarian support opportunities and we enjoy the conversations.

You can reach me, as always, at Rasmussen@InSTEDD.org, and on my direct cell at 360-621-3592.

Eric

New H1N1 Swine Flu Citizen's Guide Update

The new Pandemic Influenza Citizen's Guide, edited by Sarah Booth and Kelsey Hills-Evans to incorporate information around the recent H1N1 (Swine) flu outbreak, is now posted here.

Using InSTEDD's Evolve for Tracking and Collaborating around the 2009 H1N1 Flu Event:

Last week, InSTEDD stood up a workspace to further aid experts and responders collaborating around emerging reports related to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza event.

The workspace is based on InSTEDD's Evolve, an online application which allows a team to collaborate around multiple streams of information to assess, characterize, and respond to an event with the assistance of automated services.



Our Evolve Space offers a comprehensive set of collaborative features, including

• commenting,
• tagging,
• mapping (both user generated and automated),
• the relating of multiple alerts to each other,
• searching and filtering (by keyword and by location),
• specifying a time window,
• adding attachments,
• subscribing (currently in the form of a web-friendly format known as GeoRSS and through an email subscription),

and more.

The Evolve Workspace is also equipped with an intelligent process (sometimes referred to as a machine-learning algorithm) that "learns" from anything provided by human experts (e.g. adding a keyword or a tag, or correcting the incorrect mapping of an item). This intelligent process quickly and accurately learns to follow advice from expert humans and we're showing a 95% confidence level for the automated selections based on previous tests. The system soon starts suggesting tags, as well as correcting itself, and gradually offers even better results over time.

Have you an H1N1 alert or item you like to share with the community? You can easily contribute that alert by clicking the "Add Item" feature on our Evolve H1N1 workspace.

If you have a background in public health, international relations, diplomacy, social work, or emergency response and are interested in contributing actively to this effort please contact us at info@instedd.org.

For low volume announcements, you can follow us on Twitter. As I also mentioned in an earlier blog, we're following very rapid news events related to H1N1 epidemiology through Veratect on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/Veratect.

Related Links:

Collaborative Analytics and Environment for Linking Early Event Detection to an Effective Response

Best Poster Award for Improving Public Health Investigation and Response at the Seventh Annual International Society for Disease Surveillance Conference

InSTEDD Citizen's Guide to Pandemic Influenza (the Flu Manual)

InSTEDD has been very happy to host the Flu Manual on our site for the past year or so.

The manual, called "Pandemic Influenza Preparation and Response: A Citizen's Guide", is widely considered the best of its kind and has been reproduced in at least five languages across the globe. You can find it here. It's currently being distributed within NASA, the NFL, the Los Angeles Federal Executive Board (the largest in the nation), WebEOC, Verizon, and quite a few other locations that we're hearing about second-hand. There have been more than a thousand downloads of the Guide since the outbreak began last week and we're very pleased it's found such wide acceptance.

Although this outbreak is an H1N1 variant from Mexico and not the H5N1 avian influenza from Asia that we've all been worried about for the past few years, it's still spreading very rapidly and it's killed quite a few people in Mexico. Fortunately, that level of lethality is not yet being seen elsewhere in the world but, from our point of view, preparation is easy and sensible and we should simply do it. It's good public health practice.

The information in the current Guide is very solid for that kind of preparation. It's been designed for any pandemic influenza (not just swine or avian). It gives a great look at:

• the lessons of past pandemics,
• what the stages of a pandemic look like,
• how to prepare for social isolation techniques,
• how to care for a sick family member,
• how to prepare oral rehydration solutions,
• what to stockpile for an extended period at home,
• how to volunteer within your community,
• what measures the CDC recommends,
• where to get current information as the pandemic unfolds,
• how to prepare a home medical record of care

and much more.

The historical viewpoint you can gain from the Guide is particularly helpful. These first weeks have always been a very difficult period in an epidemic as public health staff try to sort out who, what, where, how much and all the rest. In my opinion, the World Health Organization response, as well as that of the US Center's for Disease Control in Atlanta, has been as thoughtful and as measured as anyone could hope for in the current communications age. The avalanche of information is very difficult to sort and verify, yet it's difficult to have systems in one place talk to systems in another place, and it's always really hard to get information from the developing world. The public health professionals who have not slept in much of a week have our admiration and our thanks.

Although we publish it, the Guide is not an InSTEDD creation. It was written by two Stanford University students, Sarah Booth and Kelsey Hills-Evans, with guidance on medical issues from several physicians including David Heymann, MD (then Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization in Geneva), Professor Dennis Israelski (previously Director of the Fellowship Program in Infectious Diseases at Stanford University Medical Center) and Grattan Woodson, MD.

The Guide is free and can be distributed to anyone without limitation. It's covered under a Creative Commons license and we encourage reproducing it anywhere and everywhere.



At the moment, WHO has established Pandemic Level 5 (out of a possible 6), though the absolute numbers of patients and their level of illness appear to be realtively mild throughout much of the world. Patients associated with Mexico seem to have had a more severe clinical spectrum and we'll watch to see whether that greater severity appears anywhere else.

Internally we're following the notifications on Twitter from Veratect (www.Twitter.com/Veratect) and reading the really exceptional work that Janet Ginsburg is doing on TrackerNews.net. Don't miss her hair-curling blog on factory farms and their infectious disease risks at www.TrackerBlog.InSTEDD.org.



It's an interesting time to be involved in outbreak response. We're doing quite a bit, but we've been asked to keep it private so we will. I'll mention though that, as for so many within the outbreak response community, there has not been much sleep within the InSTEDD team over the past week.

Eric

InSTEDD in the news...

We've had an exceptionally good month due to the release into beta of our software tool called GeoChat. We're testing it with users in Asia and in Africa and so far it's been well-received.

As a result of the news percolating out, InSTEDD has been covered, one way or another, by the local affiliate's ABC Evening News, by CBS Radio, by Business Week, Lancet, Nature, New Scientist, and more than thirty blogs.

For those who might like to check out a sample of what people are saying about GeoChat, a free and open source SMS and mapping-based tool designed for group messaging under stressful conditions, here you go: You can see the ABC Evening News television broadcast here, the Nature article here, the CBS Radio article here, and the New Scientist article here.