December Event: Forecasting Disease Outbreaks: Data Science for Epidemiology

Join Charlottesville Data Science for this double-feature exploring the role of data science in modern epidemic forecasting

Please join Charlottesville Data Science for a double-feature exploring the role of data science in modern epidemic forecasting. Aniruddha Adiga, a Research Assistant Professor at the UVA Biocomplexity Institute, and VP Nagraj, a practicing data scientist and Ph.D. candidate at the UVA School of Data Science, will discuss the evolving methods, data sources, and technical infrastructure shaping how we predict and respond to infectious disease outbreaks. We’ll be gathering in person at the UVA School of Data Science at 6pm on the evening of Wednesday, December 3.

Event Overview

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need for robust disease surveillance systems and outbreak analytic tools. While infectious disease modeling has been an established domain for decades, the available data streams, computational techniques, and expectations from public health stakeholders have evolved rapidly since 2020. One of the most notable shifts is the operational focus on collaborative modeling “hubs” and ensemble techniques. Currently, there are dozens of organized efforts in the US and abroad to operationally consolidate near-term forecasts and long-term projections of disease targets.

This double header will feature talks from two Charlottesville-based data scientists who are leading operational disease modeling projects and actively contributing to collaborative hub efforts. The speakers will share their experiences navigating the changing landscape of epidemiological data sources and forecasting initiatives. Each talk will combine big picture context with details on technical challenges and methodology.

Talk 1: Real-time Forecasting of Infectious Diseases: Challenges and Innovations

Aniruddha Adiga will discuss key challenges in real-time infectious disease forecasting and ongoing community efforts to develop robust modeling frameworks. He will outline the range of modeling approaches currently used in the forecasting community, highlighting their respective strengths and limitations. The talk will also showcase novel methods developed by the team at the Biocomplexity Institute, University of Virginia, aimed at improving forecast robustness and integrating diverse auxiliary data sources.

Talk 2: Automated Infectious Disease Modeling: Why? How? Should?

VP Nagraj will discuss practical considerations for automating infectious disease model training and inference. Since 2021, he has helped develop and refine cloud-based approaches to automatically prepare forecasts. He will present details of the AWS infrastructure, containerization techniques, and event-driven pipelines that have been implemented for these tasks. While presenting the technical specifics, the talk will address the tension between advantages and pitfalls of attempting to automate operational disease modeling activities.

About the Speakers

Aniruddha Adiga is a Research Assistant Professor at the Biocomplexity Institute, University of Virginia. His research spans signal processing and machine learning, with a focus on time series analysis and the development of forecasting models across diverse domains. He co-leads the Institute’s infectious disease forecasting efforts, advancing methods for real-time epidemic prediction and decision support.

VP Nagraj is an S&T Advisor at Signature Science, LLC, where he leads a team working on health security analytics projects. His experience includes infectious disease modeling, biostatistics, bioinformatics, and software development. He received his MS in Epidemiology from Columbia University and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the UVA School of Data Science.

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Thursday, November 20: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup will host an online meetup focused on Tock, an open-source, Rust-based operating system used to run multiple concurrent, mutually distrustful applications on embedded platforms, from security processors to automotive systems.

Monday, December 1: The Call for Proposals for speakers at the 2026 RVATech Data & AI Summit closes. It would be great to see members of the Charlottesville Data Science community on stage in Richmond!

Friday, December 5: The UVA Conference on Ethical AI in Business will explore the opportunities and challenges presented by the rapid adoption of AI in many types of businesses across the economy. Hosted at The Forum Hotel by the UVA Darden School of Business and organized by the LaCross AI Institute, this event brings together leading researchers and business experts to share research-grounded insights, real-world case studies, and ethical frameworks for AI adoption. One of the featured speakers is Peter McCrory, currently the Head of Economics at Anthropic.

Tuesday, December 9: Cville AI Explorers will host their December meeting, featuring the talk Tuning the Tuners: Building a Multi-Agent System for Search Relevance Optimization from Eric Pugh. Eric is a co-founder of OpenSource Connections, a Charlottesville-based search & AI consulting firm, and shapes the technical direction of the OpenSearch project.