Preparing for the next pandemic

An interdisciplinary team of Waterloo alumni and researchers develop an AI-powered surveillance system for future pandemics. By Wendy Philpott Faculty of Arts - Nobody wants to think about the next pandemic. But we need to be prepared, and a critical step in prevention is early detection and intervention. That's why GoodLabs Studio , a company with strong ties to the University of Waterloo, is advancing the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to alert health-care authorities with real-time, data-driven insights for decision-making to prevent a future pandemic. In early 2021, Canada's Department of National Defense (DND) invited proposals for innovations that strengthen the response to future pandemics. GoodLabs, co-founded by Thomas Lo (BMath '94) jumped on the opportunity and have since won two successive grants from DND to develop the Syndrome Anomaly Detection System (SADS). SADS performs widespread disease monitoring to detect patterns of atypical disease across communities so that healthcare and policy leaders can act quickly.