Strengthening Sustainable and Inclusive Analytics Ecosystem for Epidemic Preparedness

Powered by Data.org, the Epiverse-TRACE project has made substantial progress toward producing analytics tools aimed at addressing the most critical questions during epidemics. Currently, up to nine (9) Epiverse-TRACE packages are available on CRAN, with about twenty (20) more under active development. This reflects the results of two years of joint efforts between team members and our user communities.

Every year, the Epiverse-TRACE team members, along with invited stakeholders from WHO, Data.org, and various healthcare organizations, convene to discuss progress, evaluate deliverables, and plan future activities. The third Epiverse-TRACE annual summit will be held at the MRC Unit in Fajara, The Gambia from December 2 to 6, 2024, under the theme: Strengthening Sustainable and Inclusive Analytics Ecosystem for Epidemic Preparedness.

The organizing committees of this event, composed of members from the different Epiverse teams, have developed the summit’s program to ensure the success of the event. This includes a pre-summit training workshop scheduled to be held a week before the summit (25 - 29 November 2024). The training will be conducted by our team of Research Fellows (RFs), supported by Research Software Engineers (RSEs). Participants will learn how to use our tools within an outbreak analysis workflow.

Previous Summits

Collaborative Software Development Ecosystem for Public Health

The second Epiverse-TRACE summit was held in Bogota, Colombia, from the 26th to 29th of June 2023. The participants were given the opportunity to bring their thoughts on the following topics:

  1. Collaborative Software Development

  2. Building a Community of Users

  3. Building RSE & Data Science Teams

  4. TRACE in the Global Perspective

The outcomes from these fruitful discussions are summarised in the report published by the TRACE-LAC team in Colombia.

100 days and 100 lines of code

The first Epiverse-TRACE summit was held in London, UK, from the 12th to 14th of December 2022. The event was organised in the form of a workshop around a central question: “What should the first 100 lines of code written during new epidemics look like?”, together with groups working on processing and analysis pipelines, the organisations working on the front-line response and generating data looked into the challenges around building efficient and centralised analysis pipelines. The main topics included:

  1. Sharing Experiences of Outbreak Responses

  2. Identifying the Challenges and Questions during Outbreaks

  3. Building Collaboration and Pipelines

The details of the outcomes from these three-day discussions are summarised in this blog post.