Public health intelligence (PHI) describes the process of moving from data through knowledge synthesis to action with the specific aim of early detection for effective response. In this interactive session, we'll hear about the experience of a variety of countries that have an active public health intelligence function, including Member States looking to implement EIOS in the coming year. Understanding how future EIOS stakeholders implement PHI and event-based surveillance activities will provide the starting point for the EIOS community as a whole to identify challenges and opportunities for integrating EIOS into existing systems and filling vital gaps in capacity.

Within a year of CERN making World Wide Web technology public, ideas for systems that would capitalise on this new wealth of information for public health intelligence began to pop up. This ushered in a new era for event-based surveillance, allowing us to tap into huge amounts of varied information quickly and build systems that would help collect and filter the information to facilitate the manual detection of unusual events. In this interactive panel session, we'll hear from a sampling of the pioneers of these systems, learn about their developments to date, their plans moving forward and how we can work together as one community to capitalise on different system strengths and find solutions for the gaps.

While Phase 1 of EIOS expansion has only just begun, several stakeholders have been piloting the system, helping to provide initial feedback for system improvements. From global intentional threats to regional routine intelligence, animal health to mass gatherings, we'll hear from some of these pioneers, learning about the different ways in which user groups have worked within the EIOS system to create and implement processes and protocols to meet the unique needs of their communities.

Social media has revolutionised modern day communication with significant potential applications for public health intelligence. Studies demonstrate the promising capacity of social media to improve surveillance through early event detection. Identifying different social media platforms, understanding how people communicate through them and understanding how public health stakeholders can ethically integrate them within the context of early warning is therefore a necessary exercise, but one fraught with challenges. This interactive panel will discuss different strategies and experiences in using social media for public health intelligence.

The huge volume of information available to us through open sources is an incredibly rich and useful resource, but making sense of it all, knowing what to focus on and linking concepts together across it all is overwhelming. Sifting through it and synthesising it to extract relevant information and data points - or entities - is humanly impossible, but with the help of the right computing power and algorithms, the impossible becomes possible. Not to replace us, but to augment us. This is the topic of Artificial Intelligence for Intelligence Augmentation session.

The continuous enhancement and integration of the innovative technologies into the EIOS system is a core component of the EIOS initiative. Since the last EIOS Global Technical Meeting in December 2018, exciting new collaborations have been established with partners to explore new technologies and concepts for the enhancement of the EIOS system. The main aim of this session is for some of the collaborators to present ongoing work in the evolution of the EIOS system.

This is the second of the two applied research-based sessions and focuses on how extracted information can be used to better understand disease spread. Much has been and continues to be published on disease modeling, ranging from the use of animal and human movement to predict disease importation and exportation to the most cost-efficient number of persons needed to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. Modeling can help assess current risk, forecast spread and future risk and inform public health practice and response activities...but how confident are we in media signals and the models that are developed? This session will highlight two ongoing projects: comparing influenza signals in online media to signals from laboratory reporting across different regions and developing epidemiological models and indicators for assessing infectious disease risks.

Once a public health crisis has been detected...then what? Effective event management processes are critical to follow the event, assess it on a continual basis, determine the most effective time and way to respond, then "rinse and repeat"! By ensuring that events are documented and shared early, actions are better informed and appropriate, based on well-founded risk assessments and international best practices. In this session, the panel will share some of the current systems being developed for assessing and managing events, allowing us to discuss similarities and differences, strengths and gaps, and explore ways to harmonise and connect systems if and where appropriate.

This session will highlight stakeholder engagement in the EIOS expansion process at the global, regional, and national levels. For those involved in the current expansion phase, we'll learn what their training experiences have been so far, the challenges faced, and strategies used to engage, train, and support implementation of the system. As we look to transition into Phase 2 of expansion mid to late next year, we invite regions, countries, and other stakeholders preparing to implement EIOS in 2020 to share their plans, identify areas for support, and initiate a community-wide discussion to explore challenges and opportunities for the next expansion phases.

Training and capacity building are essential components of strengthening surveillance systems and improving global preparedness to more effectively and efficiently detect, assess, communicate, and act on potential public health emergencies. In this session, we'll hear from stakeholders involved in developing comprehensive surveillance and training frameworks to learn how the broader PHI capacity building frameworks are being developed and how event-based surveillance is being integrated.

What would you do to improve event-based surveillance if you were handed $100,000? Improve translation of existing tools, enhance system detection speed by improving algorithms, provide integrated EBS training at national level? During this interactive session, participants will work in small teams to brainstorm, refine, and pitch a proposal on what they would do to improve the event-based surveillance environment and have the opportunity to gather feedback and insights from a panel of donors. This activity session is also an opportunity to network and begin building these collaborative relationships to potentially bring these ideas to life.