Due to various outbreaks of influenza and continuing bioterrorism threat, research efforts on infectious disease and public health surveillance have become very important worldwide. In this talk we will explain and classify the various types of health surveillance problems. We review the latest research in surveillance systems, monitoring methods, and performance measures. We also discuss the research challenges and illustrate them with various problems and examples. In particular, we will compare the performance of Scan, CUSUM, and EWMA charts for temporal, spatial, and spatiotemporal surveillance.

Kwok-Leung Tsui is a professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1986. Dr. Tsui was a recipient of the NSF Young Investigator Award in 1992. He was the (elected) President and Vice President of the American Statistical Association Atlanta Chapter in 1992-1993; the Chair of the INFORMS Section in Quality, Statistics, and Reliability in 2000; and the Founding Chair of the Section in Data Mining in 2004. He is a fellow of American Statistical Association, a US representative in the ISO Technical Committee on Statistical Methods, and a department editor of the IIR Transactions. His current research interests include data mining and surveillance in healthcare and public health, calibration and validation of computer models, bioinformatics, process control and monitoring, and robust design and Taguchi method.