A team including Fahad Pervaiz, a CSE doctoral student, has developed a system that can forecast the outbreak of dengue fever by simply analyzing the calling behavior of citizens to a public-health hotline. The telephone-based disease surveillance system can forecast 2 to 3 weeks ahead of time outbreaks of dengue fever, a mosquito-borne virus that infects up to 400,000 people each year.
The forecasting system, described in a paper published July 8 in Science Advances, was developed by researchers from the UW and NYU, working teams in Pakistan.
The team of computer scientists and electrical engineers encoded and decoded a video of the band OK Go (featuring the craziest Rube Goldberg machine ever), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in more than 100 languages, the top 100 books of Project Gutenberg and the Crop Trust’s seed database — among other things— all on strands of DNA.
Luis Ceze, the UW’s Torode Family Career Development Professor of computer science and engineering and one of the project’s lead researchers, says, "The world is producing data at an incredible rate, and storage technologies need to keep up. DNA... is millions of times denser than other storage media, it is incredibly durable (think millennia) and it never becomes obsolete. "