nformation systems play a central role in developing an effective, comprehensive approach to prevent, detect, respond to, and manage potential infectious disease outbreaks and bioterrorism events. Great quantities of animal and public health infectious disease and surveillance data are collected by various laboratories, health care providers, veterinarians, and government agencies at local, state, national, and international levels. Furthermore, many agencies have developed information access, analysis, and reporting systems of varying degrees of sophistication. Researchers from a wide range of backgrounds including but not limited to epidemiology, statistics, applied mathematics, information systems, computer science and machine learning/data mining, have also contributed by developing technologies to facilitate real-time data collection and sharing, and surveillance algorithms to analyze collected data. In effect, recent years have witnessed the emergence of infectious disease informatics (IDI), a subfield of biomedical informatics that systematically studies these information management and analysis issues. The objective of IDI research can be summarized as the development of the science and technologies needed for collecting, sharing, reporting, analyzing, and visualizing infectious disease data and for providing data and decision-making support for infectious disease prevention, detection, and management.

Proceedings will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. For more information about LNCS, please visit the LNCS website (http://www.springer.com/LNCS).

This year's meeting will be co-located with the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI 2007).

he first NSF Workshop on Biosurveillance, hosted by the University of Arizona’s NSF BioPortal Center, was held in March 2006 in Tucson, Arizona. This successful workshop provided a stimulating intellectual forum for discussion among public and animal health researchers; experts information technologies and systems; state and federal public and animal health officials; and biomedical/IT practitioners. The 2007 NSF Workshop on Biosurveillance Systems and Case Studies (Biosurveillance 2007) built on this success and brought together IDI researchers and practitioners to discuss selected topics directly relevant to data sharing and analysis for real-time animal and public health surveillance. Biosurveillance 2007 aimed to achieve the following objectives: (a) review and examine various real-time data sharing approaches for animal and public health surveillance from both technological and policy perspectives; (b) identify key technical challenges facing syndromic surveillance for both animal and human diseases, and discuss and compare related systems approaches and algorithms; and (c) provide a forum to bring together IDI researchers and practitioners to identify future research opportunities.

National Science Foundation
IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society