The MOOD Annual Consortium Meeting was held on Thursday 23rd and Friday 24th at Agropolis International, Montepellier (France).
In this occasion, partners presented the scientific achievements of the previous year, as well as the progress and future steps of each working group.
Besides the Working Packages programme, AVIA-gis (WP5) led the co-development sessions for the generic and disease-specific tools that will be part of the MOOD platform for epidemic intelligence together with invited end-users.
Objectives of the meeting
- Share Update on WPs progress and case studies, as well as the development of the MOOD platform;
- Collect inputs from end-users on the development to be finalized by the end of the project for the MOOD platform;
- Promote networking and reinforce collaboration between partners.
Programme
180 participants
Among partners and Public Health and Animal Health practitioners, in person and online
CIRAD
Organizers: MOOD Coordination team, CIRAD.
23-24 June
15 sessions
Highlights and achievements - a message from the MOOD project
We are happy to have had over 60 MOOD consortium partners present in person at the first face-to-face MOOD meeting in Montpellier.
We are thankful for everyone that attended the meeting both in person and remotely and enriched the meeting with useful questions, comments and suggestions.
We also had over ten potential end-users from public/animal health agencies attending in person from Europe and online from the Réunion and Mayotte.
We are thankful for the on site presence of the external experts from the WHOAH, founded as the OIE and the ECDC as potential end-users and providers of scientific and technical advice. We are thankful for the online participation of the experts and potential end-users from the FAO and EFSA.
We are thankful for the contribution of the two independent ethics and data protection advisors of the MOOD project from Ethicas, Spain and Rhizome, Belgium.
We are thankful to the Ukrainian team of researchers from the Kharkiv and Karazin University for their in-person attendance and useful inputs for potential collaborations in the domain of sociology, epidemiology, artificial intelligence and mathematical modelling.
MOOD platform updates
- The MOOD platform will integrate disease-risk models, covariates data and cutting-edge information extraction techniques developed during the research-stage project, into accessible, easy and intuitive tools that will provide decision-ready information in support of disease surveillance and monitoring by public and animal health agencies and organizations;
- The ‘Disease risk mapping’ module provides users with risk maps and other modelled outputs for specific diseases (7 model pathogens), and it is currently undergoing the user input collection stage in regards to how they want to use these models:
- A MOOD no-profit association will be founded before the end of the project and will be in charge of not only maintaining the platform but also to further building on it;
- Regarding the MOOD non-for-profit foundation, as AVIA-GIS is in charge, it will contact in the months to follow all the partners on the legal parts of the organization, to start discussing memberships.
- Some data is already accessible for the project, further meetings for collaboration and data sharing with the international and national public and animal health agencies would be beneficial, especially regarding the sustainability of the data flows for the future MOOD non-for-profit foundation.
- The project is reaching good results, however, facilitators and developers should stay in touch with the potential end-users. Even if the platform isn’t final, it should be shared with potential users and further collect inputs and comments on the use.
Guy Hendickx – AVIA-gis CEO and WP5 leader
MOOD platform updates Generic MOOD platform module updates
The generic part of the platform, which will include Data and Covariate access, improved visualization and personalized queries, is already under development and the first prototype is expected by the end of 2022 for user testing.
- Covariates module (Cedric Masboom, AVIA-GIS) – development & discussion with potential end-users and cases study facilitators continues;
- Event-based data (Padi-web) visualization and analytics module (Pascal Poncelet, LIRMM) – development & discussion with potential end-users and cases study facilitators continues
Work package updates and future actions
WP1 – Interface with stakeholders for innovation
Fact sheets on the state-of-the-art of Epidemic intelligence in Europe are in the making; The results of a survey underlying the fact sheets are planned for writing up as a scientific paper describing the state-of-the-art of Epidemic Intelligence in Europe.- We continue to help improve the assessment and response to the threat of unknown diseases. Elements that will feed into strategy and guidance documents for epidemic intelligence procedures include research on the science-policy interface during COVID-19 pandemic decision-ma
king and the COVID-19 case study. - In the course of the previous point, we are finalizing the write-up of COVID-19 reflections and recommendations on the uptake of scientific evidence in pandemic decision-making (Finland and France as case study countries).
- Based on this research, we were invited to organize a high-level workshop at the Geneva Health Forum (GHF) titled “Time to rethink the science-policy interface? From COVID-19 lessons learned to strengthen One Health global policy co-convened with partners from MOOD Project and the Geneva Science-Policy Interface. The output of the above workshop is currently being written up as a perspective paper
- We will continue to pursue further data collection and analyses in the course of the COVID-19 case study (see COVID-19 case study).
- We have identified current needs of information from the practitioners concerning the case studies. We will make the requested information about the tools and how to access them clearly visible on the website. This should trigger the testing and further enhance the interactions between practitioners and mood partners.
- We explore how to better integrate diverse sources of risk data (from local actors and researchers) in tick and tick-borne epidemic intelligence activities;
- The remaining work committed continues to be in line with the Description of Action;
WP2 – Disease intelligence
- Improving text-mining algorithms for event-based surveillance: integration of quality criteria for event extraction, enhancing spatial entity recognition in news, improving output of PADI-Web for end-users
- The remaining work committed continues to be in line with the Description of Action
WP3 – Data ingestion pipeline
- Continue identification and provision of covariate datasets according to the user’s needs and WP4 needs
- Improve the workflow for spatial data normalization (all data) and processing (for unofficial data) and provide a concrete and global workflow (proof of concept) for the use-case Avian Influenza
- Design the linking data workflow (disease and covariate data – official and non official data) based on spatial, temporal and thematic anchors
- The remaining work committed continues to be in line with the the Description of Action
WP 4 – Modelling
- The work committed continues to be in line with the Description of Action
WP 5 – MOOD Platform
- The work committed continues to be in line with the Description of Action
WP6 – Communication, dissemination and impact assessment
- The impact of MOOD innovations on the performances of disease surveillance systems and end-user practices regarding epidemic intelligence have been evaluated.
- The co-conception process, scientist-user interaction and new knowledge/EI practices linked to the use of MOOD tools and services will be assessed.
- Multi-dimensional changes in epidemiological indicators and the performance of the epidemic surveillance systems will be measured.
- Multidisciplinary approaches (by combining epidemiological and socio-anthropology studies) will be used to conduct this evaluation.
- Regular assessment of production, readiness level (TRL), and uptakes of MOOD tools and services will be conducted longitudinally during the entire duration of the project
- The remaining work committed continues to be in line with the Description of Action
WP7 Coordination and management
- Seven deliverables are to be completed by end of 2022, mainly for WP5, which represents 4% of the total 51 deliverables of the project
- A session of Impact pathway review will be conducted during the MOOD meeting planned with case study facilitators and module developers of the MOOD platform on the 12-13 October 2022 in Paris, CIRAD offices (face-to-face meeting). A preliminary work of reformulation of the outcomes by model will be implemented within the 6.4 group in order to prepare this session
- The remaining work committed continues to be in line with the the Description of Action
WP8 Ethics and data protection
- The work committed continues to be in line with the Description of Action