Global Tracking of Infectious Disease Outbreaks and Emerging Biological Threats

MiTAP (MITRE Text and Audio Processing) is a prototype system available for monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and other global events. MiTAP focuses on providing timely, multi-lingual, global information access to medical experts and individuals involved in humanitarian assistance and relief work. Multiple information sources in multiple languages are automatically captured, filtered, translated, summarized, and categorized by disease, region, information source, person, and organization. Critical information is automatically extracted and tagged to facilitate browsing, searching, and sorting. The system supports shared situational awareness through collaboration, allowing users to submit other articles for processing, annotate existing documents, post directly to the system, and flag messages for others to see. MiTAP currently stores over one million articles and processes an additional 2000 to 10,000 daily, delivering up-to-date information to dozens of regular users. Global Tracking of Infectious Disease Outbreaks and Emerging Biological Threats Over the years, greatly expanded trade and travel have increased the potential economic and political impacts of major disease outbreaks, given their ability to move rapidly across national borders. These diseases can affect people (West Nile virus, HIV, Ebola, Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis), animals (foot-and-mouth disease) and plants (citrus canker in Florida). More recently, the potential of biological terrorism has become a very real threat. On September 11, 2001, the Center for Disease Control alerted states and local public health agencies to monitor for any unusual disease patterns, including the effects of chemical and biological agents. In addition to possible disruption and loss of life, bioterrorism could foment political instability, given the panic that fast-moving plagues have historically engendered. Appropriate response to disease outbreaks and emerging threats depends on obtaining reliable and up-to-date Approved for Public Release: Distribution Unlimited. To be published in AI Magazine, special edition highlighting best work from IAAI-02. information, which often means monitoring many news sources, particularly local news sources, in many languages worldwide. Analysts cannot feasibly acquire, manage, and digest the vast amount of information available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition, access to foreign language documents and the local news of other countries is generally limited. Even when foreign language news is available, it is usually no longer current by the time it is translated and reaches the hands of an analyst. This is a very real problem that raises an urgent need to develop automated support for global tracking of infectious disease outbreaks and emerging biological threats. Figure 1 The potential of biological terrorism has become a very real threat. Health officials need tools to monitor and track biological and chemical events. The MiTAP (MITRE Text and Audio Processing) system was created to explore the integration of synergistic TIDES language processing technologies: Translation, Information Detection, Extraction, and Summarization. TIDES aims to revolutionize the way that information is obtained from human language by enabling people to find and interpret needed information quickly and effectively, regardless of language or medium. MiTAP is designed to provide the end user with timely, accurate, novel information and present it in a way that allows the analyst to spend more time on analysis and less time on finding, translating, distilling and presenting information. On September 11, 2001, the research prototype system became available to real users for real problems. Figure 2 MiTAP provides timely, multi-lingual, global information access to analysts, medical experts, and individuals involved in humanitarian assistance and disaster