Seminar Series. Ethan Jackson: Microsoft Health & the Premonition project
Apr 22, 2021 12-1pm Pacific
Project Premonition begins with the idea of using a mosquito-as-a-device, which can locate an animal in the environment and collect a blood sample. There are over 3,600 known species of mosquitoes feeding on reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals in every continent except Antarctica; they are ubiquitous blood samplers. If mosquitoes could be autonomously collected at scale from the environment, they might provide broad insight into the epidemiology and evolution of potential pathogens. The major challenges of such a system are the high-throughput collection of wild caught mosquitoes and the computational analysis of their body contents. These are the technical challenges Project Premonition is attempting to solve. In this presentation, I will describe our on-going efforts to implement a Project Premonition system. Our overall system architecture is designed to: (1) autonomously obtain blood samples from animal populations via robotically-collected wild-caught mosquitoes, (2) apply high-throughput gene sequencing (NGS) to convert samples into metagenomic data, (3) use cloud-scale computational genomics to extract potential threats. The vision is a low-cost and high throughput system that exploits commodity robotics, drones, and NGS platforms to sample nucleic acids from many hosts and reduce pathogen detection to computational problems. This is joint work with Microsoft Research, Johns Hopkins University, University of Pittsburgh, Vanderbilt University, and the University of California at Riverside.
About the speaker
Dr. Ethan Jackson is a Senior Director and Principal Researcher at Microsoft Healthcare. His research focuses on intelligent systems that make people – and the environments around them – healthier. Ethan’s background is in cyber-physical systems, program verification, and programming languages, which he applies to develop novel health-related technologies.
Ethan directs Microsoft Premonition, an advanced incubation project aiming to detect the movements of potential pathogens in the environment, before they cause outbreaks in humans. Microsoft Premonition is developing robotic field biologists and metagenomic technologies to find, collect, and analyze disease-transmitting insects for both known and unknown viruses. Our systems are also designed to collect big data on insect behavior to better inform epidemiological models and public health organizations.
Ethan is also the creator of the FORMULA system for building domain specific programming languages and enabling formal analysis of complex software, which has been used in large academic and industrial settings. He is also the co-creator of the P programming language which allows developers to specify complex systems of communicating asynchronous components, and has been used to design critical components of Microsoft Windows.
Ethan joined Microsoft Research 2007 after receiving his PhD from Vanderbilt University in Computer Science.
The EPPIcenter at UCSF https://eppicenter.ucsf.edu
The EPPIcenter brings a systems epidemiology approach to understanding complex infectious disease dynamics by integrating state-of-the-art data collection, molecular technologies, and computational analysis. Our interdisciplinary approach provides novel insight into the targeting of interventions to reduce and ultimately eliminate infectious disease burden. The EPPIcenter aims to advance the understanding of infectious diseases to reduce global morbidity and mortality. We believe that the greatest success in the fight against infectious diseases will come through a highly interdisciplinary, systems epidemiology approach, connecting traditionally siloed theoretical work, technology development, generation and collection of empiric data, and analysis using statistical and mathematical modeling.