Collaborative Research: A Workshop on Pre-emergence and the Predictions of Rare Events in Multiscale, Complex, Dynamical Systems

虽然流行病自古以来就威胁着人类文明，但如何预测和预防流行病仍然是最紧迫的挑战之一，需要创新的见解和实践。流行病是通过偶然的“完美风暴”出现的：病原体的分子变化、气候的渐进趋势、潜在宿主之间生态相互作用的微妙变化，甚至是人们的个人行为决定，所有这些共同构成了一种已知疾病有趣但罕见的新变种与一场存在的全球危机之间的差异。因此，要能够预测大流行威胁的出现，就需要一种完全综合的多学科方法，能够考虑到这些领域在相互作用范围内的复杂性，从而进行预测，并在理想情况下进行预防。本次研讨会将包括来自生物学、数学、工程学、计算机科学、生态学和社会科学等不同学术团体的专家，他们将聚集在一起，讨论如何将每个团体采取的方法整合成一门更有效、更统一的流行病预测科学。讨论将利用最近在疾病生态学、计算生物学和生物物理学、信息和网络科学、传感和统计学方面的进展来分析相关数据，使难以测量的信息推理和实时观察、计算和实验的集成成为可能。讲习班的目的是制定一个关于大流行病防范的新的科学基础，确定需要解决的科学差距，并讨论如何设计解决办法，以预期多学科使用的方式填补这些差距。与会者将审议如何构建综合和多学科框架，以便更好地了解大流行病出现的基本过程，并将这些见解转化为预防和/或减轻大流行病威胁的实用工具。预计讲习班将就关键和不同的相关领域如何共同向前发展提出具体建议，以加强全球安全，防范未来的大流行病。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Although pandemics have threatened human civilization since ancient times, how to predict and prevent them remains one of the most pressing challenges, calling out for innovative insights and practices. Pandemics emerge through incidental ‘perfect storms’: molecular changes in pathogens, gradual trends in climate, subtle shifts in ecological interactions among potential hosts, and even individual behavioral decisions by people, all colluding to make up the difference between an interesting but rare new variant of a known disease and an existential worldwide crisis. Being able to predict the emergence of pandemic threats, therefore, requires a fully integrated, multidisciplinary approach, able to consider the complexity of these realms across scales of interaction to predict and, ideally, prevent. This workshop will include experts from otherwise disparate scholarly communities in biology, mathematics, engineering, computer science, ecology and social science to come together and discuss how to integrate the approaches taken by each community into a more effective, unified science of pandemic prediction. Discussions will leverage recently developed advances in disease ecology, computational biology and biophysics, information and network science, sensing, and statistics to analyze pertinent data, enabling inference of difficult-to-measure information and the integration of real-time observation, computation, and experimentation. The workshop aims at formulating a new science base on pandemic preparedness, identifying scientific gaps that need to be addressed, and discussing how to design solutions to fill those gaps in ways that anticipate multidisciplinary use. Participants will consider how to construct integrative and multidisciplinary frameworks to enable better insights into the fundamental processes of pandemic emergence and translate those insights into practical tools for preventing and/or mitigating pandemic threats. It is anticipated that the workshop will result into concrete recommendations for how the critical and diverse relevant fields can move forward together to increase global safety, guarding against future pandemics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.