Predicting epidemics like the weather: How Microsoft Premonition can help in the global fight against disease outbreaks
by Suzanne Choney - Sep 22, 2020
“What’s the weather like outside?”
It’s a simple question, that we don’t think twice about. Our smart assistants, phones or a simple internet search can answer it. But it actually takes a global sensor network of weather stations, advanced data analytics and modern supercomputers to make these predictions.
Microsoft Premonition envisions doing the same for predicting the distribution and evolution of microbes, viruses and disease-carrying animals in the Earth’s biome, or the life around us. If the biome could be monitored like the weather, environmental pathogens might be detected earlier and outbreaks predicted before they cause large epidemics.
Today, more than ever, new global sensor networks are needed to protect our health, and the health of our economies and societies.
“Microsoft Premonition changes the paradigm from reacting to known pathogens to continuously looking for them as they evolve,” says Ethan Jackson, senior director of Microsoft Premonition. “These signals could help us spot potential threats earlier, respond faster and develop new interventions before outbreaks occur.”
Microsoft Premonition is an advanced early warning system that combines robotic sensing platforms, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and cloud-scale metagenomics to autonomously monitor disease-carrying animals such as mosquitoes, robotically collect environmental samples, and then genomically scan them for biological threats.
Like weather prediction, its analytics pipelines uses cloud-scale computing, leveraging the latest advancements in Azure IoT and Azure Data Lake on Microsoft Azure. Today, Premonition’s pipelines have scanned more than 80 trillion base-pairs of genomic material from environmental samples for biological threats.
Newly announced is Microsoft Premonition Cloud, which uses Microsoft Azure for aggregating and analyzing data that is collected by Microsoft Premonition, and will be available in coming weeks through an Early Access Program.
An estimated 60% to 75% of emerging infectious diseases are caused by pathogens that jump from animals to people. This includes viruses like Zika, West Nile, dengue and most recently, COVID-19.