History
IBC's academic research roots can be traced back to the Artificial
Intelligence (AI) Lab at the University of Arizona. IBC's co-founders,
Dr. Hsinchun Chen, Dr. Daniel Zeng, and Mr. Chunju Tseng, are all
active or alumni members of the AI Lab.
A recent project at the AI Lab of direct relevance to IBC is the
BioPortal™ Research Prototype project, a joint research effort of the AI
Lab, and several state health departments and universities. This
Prototype project was initially funded from October 2003
to October 2004 by the NSF through
its Digital Government program, with
funding contributions from the DHS and Intelligence Technology
Innovation Center (grant #EIA-9983304 Supplement), to fulfill the
recommendation from a federal inter-agency committee called
the Infectious Disease Informatics Working
Committee (IDIWC) to develop a prototype infectious
disease informatics infrastructure.
The objective of
the BioPortal™ Research Prototype effort was to
demonstrate and assess the information technology for
cross-jurisdictional infectious disease information sharing, analysis,
and visualization. Upon its successful completion in 2004, a 5-year NSF
grant, through its highly competitive Information Technology Research
Program (grant #IIS-0428241), was secured to fund further
long-term
Infectious Disease Informatics technical research from the perspectives
of data analysis and system scalability.
Since 2005, several additional
exploratory research grants (from the State of
Arizona, DHS, and Kansas
State University) have been awarded to branch out from the main
BioPortal™ Research Prototype effort to study animal and human disease
syndromic surveillance.
IBC was founded to commercialize the technology developed by the
BioPortal™ Research Prototype effort to meet
the real-world challenges facing the public health community in a broad
range of application settings. It has also been our intent to leverage
our significant real-world experience in developing public safety
information systems to explore messaging and information sharing
between public health and public safety systems for both public health
and biosecurity event monitoring and management.