Our mission: To develop the theory and practice of epidemic detection, tracking and forecasting, and their use in decision making, both public and private.
Our vision: To make this technology as useful as weather forecasting is today.
- Founded in 2012 at Carnegie Mellon University, now spanning 3 universities
- Perennial winners of CDC’s “predict the flu” challenge since 2014
- Designated a 6-year National Center of Excellence for Flu Forecasting by CDC’s Influenza Division (2019-2025)
- Designated a 5-year National Center for Innovation by CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (2023-2028)
- Our Epidata repository of real-time, geographically-detailed epidemic indicators contains more than 750 indicators totaling over 5 billion records, with 3 million records being added daily. During the pandemic, it recieved on average 100,000 queries/day, from more than 50,000 unique IP addresses in a 3 month period.
- Data partners and collaborators include CDC, UnitedHealth/Optum, Change Healthcare, Google, Meta, Amazon, QuidelOrtho, and others
- Funders include CDC, DTRA, Google, Meta, Optum, McCune Foundation, Uptake and others
- Winner of the Newell Research Excellence Award (2021), SPAIG award for Academe-Industry-Government partnership (2021), AAPOR Policy Impact Award (2022), and AAPOR Innovation Award (2022).
Our strategy:
- Procure real-time, aggregated data streams informative of varied infectious diseases and syndromes, in collaboration with industry partners and public health agencies
- Extract indicators— many at daily and county-level resolution— from these streams and make them widely available via the Delphi EpiPortal and API; enhance their value with automated revision tracking, revision projection, anomaly detection, trend detection, access control, smoothing, and geographic, temporal and demographic stratification
- Develop and deploy algorithms for epidemic detection, tracking (nowcasting), and forecasting
- Develop and share tools for indicator access, processing, and forecasting
- Work closely with public health agencies to understand and support their needs
- Make it all real-time, operational, maximally accessible, and open-source
Our target users:
- CDC, state and local public health agencies (STLTs)
- Although our long term goal is global, our near-term focus is the U.S.)
- The epi-forecasting research community
- The healthcare industry
- Other public, private and government organizations
- Data journalists
- The general public
