Public health surveillance systems routinely process massive volumes of data to identify health adverse events affecting the general population. Surveillance and response to foodborne disease suffers from a number of systemic and other delays that hinder early detection and confirmation of emerging contamination situations. In this paper we develop an answer set programming (ASP) application to assist public health officials in detecting an emerging foodborne disease outbreak by integrating and analyzing in near real-time temporally, spatially and symptomatically diverse data. These data can be extracted from a large number of distinct information systems such as surveillance and laboratory reporting systems from health care providers, real-time complaint hotlines from consumers, and inspection reporting systems from regulatory agencies. We encode geographic ontologies in ASP to infer spatial relationships that may not be evident using traditional statistical tools. These technologies and ontologies have been implemented in a new informatics tool, the North Carolina Foodborne Events Data Integration and Analysis Tool (NCFEDA). The application was built to demonstrate the potential of situational awareness—created through real-time data fusion, analytics, visualization, and real-time communication—to reduce latency of response to foodborne disease outbreaks by North Carolina public health personnel.
On Thursday, January 30, we’ll be livestreaming the opening session of our fourth annual Frontiers of Entrepreneurship conference, featuring the release of the first-ever Trends in Entrepreneurship Report and a series of interviews with experts speaking to the findings and themes highlighted. The full report will be available for download at frontiers.unc.edu. 9:30 a.m. EST: Opening Frontiers of Entrepreneurship conference plenary + 2020 Trends in Entrepreneurship Launch 12:00 p.m. EST: Interview with Kenan Institute Executive Director Greg Brown 12:20 p.m. EST: Interview with JPMorgan Chase Institute Director of Business Research Chris Wheat 12:40 p.m. EST: Interview with University of Chicago Polsky Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Executive Director Starr Marcello 1:00 p.m. EST: Interview with Union Square Ventures Partner Brad Burnham 1:20 p.m. EST: Interview with UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Phillip Hettleman Distinguished Scholar, Professor and Area Chair of Strategy & Entrepreneurship Chris Bingham 1:40 p.m. EST: Interview with Backstage Capital Founder and Managing Partner Arlan Hamilton
Faculty Director of the Rethinc. FinTech Lab, Eric Ghysels was featured as the keynote speaker at the 2nd Crypto Asset Lab Conference. The conference, which took place on Tuesday, October 27th, focuses on all aspects of bitcoin and crypto assets, especially those pertaining to investment, banking, finance, monetary economics, and regulation. Topics included cryptocurrency adoption and transition dynamics, digital cash and payment systems, economics and/or game theoretic analysis of cryptocurrency protocols, economic and monetary aspects of cryptocurrencies and the legal, ethical and societal aspects of (decentralized) cryptocurrencies.
Participants in the 2019 Kenan Institute Frontiers of Entrepreneurship conference address the obstacles facing women and underrepresented minority entrepreneurs – from funding to mentorship, resourcing and more – and why overcoming those barriers matters for the broader U.S. and global economies.