The UK Chief Medical Officer noted that “infectious disease is as great a threat to national security as climate change” (with more than one new threatening disease identified each year), and that “the difficulty and challenge in identifying and tracking future threats is not the acquisition of trusted physiological and genomic data, but in using these huge databases with new computer science methods for analysis.”

We use machine learning to greatly improve our ability to identify and fight outbreaks of infectious disease – including the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 – using AI-based systems.  This theme of research collaborates closely with Public Health England (the UK’s Centre for Disease Control or CDC), experts in microbiology from Oxford University Hospitals, and a global network of CDCs from some of the world’s largest countries.