13 - 18 OCTOBER 2013, ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA

Public Health's Wicked Problems: Can InfoVis Save Lives?

Organizers: 
Susan J. Robinson (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Organizers: 
Marty Cetron (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Organizers: 
Hazel Dean (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Organizers: 
Bradford Hesse (National Cancer Institute, NIH)
Organizers: 
John Stasko (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Organizers: 
Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland)
Organizers: 
David S. Ebert (Purdue University)
Description

The goal of the workshop is to bring together world-class public health and information visualization experts and curious learners to discuss how the fields can come together to generate new tools for emerging and longstanding public health problems. Public health is charged with assessing current and emerging health threats and issues, developing effective population-based policies and interventions to address these problems, and monitoring delivery and outcomes of public health actions. Many public health problems, such as the obesity epidemic, HIV/STI transmission, and environmental hazards are called "wicked" due to their complexity and multi-layered causal factors at individual, group, and social levels (Kreuter, 2004). To make decisions about when and where to deploy resources that produce the greatest net benefits in complex or rapidly evolving situations, public health practitioners need new tools to integrate multiple sources of data from formal disease surveillance systems, secondary sources of geographic and demographic data, and new data streams such as real-time social media content. We invite original research, case studies/practice reports, systematic reviews, evaluation studies, methodology innovations, or commentary on the following topics of specific interest, while welcoming work on all aspects of public health and information visualization. See the workshop's website for more information.