The CDC’s fledgling Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics hopes to build on disease-monitoring systems pioneered during the Covid-19 pandemic.
It’s ramping up with the hire last month of Eric Rescorla as chief technologist. Rescorla’s tech resume includes serving as chief technology officer at Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser, and leading a review of California voting machines in 2007 for then-Secretary of State Debra Bowen. Rescorla says he’s been a fan of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since he read “Disease Detectives,” a book about the agency by Gerald Astor, as a child. Ben caught up with Rescorla to talk about the new center's goals. Dylan George, the center's director, joined the conversation. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The center officially launched in January. Where are you at now? George: We’re a startup in government. We’re building the organization, team, tools and partnerships to be successful. We need to work more effectively with the private sector. We started with five, and now we’re at a headcount of about 50. We’re targeting in our first buildout to be about 130 people. Rescorla: There’s an amazing amount of high-powered expertise in modeling and disease analytics at CDC. Where I can help is bringing some of the techniques that have been developed in industry to help bring that horsepower to bear faster and more efficiently. What obstacles remain? George: We need to have the data move at the speed of need, and that’s still a challenge. We need the data authorities to collect the data from states and localities and move it very quickly. Building out our team and tools is going to be critical. We need to have sustained funding. We’re aspirationally building towards working with state and local jurisdictions so you can have that weather forecast everyone uses to decide whether they need to take an umbrella, but it’s going to take a while. Rescorla: It’s important for us to not do it alone. We have the National Weather Service, which does amazing work, but we also have Apple Weather and things like that. What’s the biggest technical challenge? George: One of the biggest is getting the data to move quickly and interoperably. The Data Modernization Initiative, a sister effort, is critically important for us to succeed. Our 10x value proposition is to provide advanced analytics to the CDC director and White House. I’m very confident we can do that. We’ve been doing it the past year or so. Our 100x value proposition is doing that for state and local jurisdictions, but to achieve that, we need the Data Modernization Initiative to succeed. What role will artificial intelligence play in this? Rescorla: It’s probably too soon to tell. It's an incredibly powerful tool, so it’s important to take a look and see if it can be used to make analysis go faster. George: There is one area where we’re clear it will help us — machine learning operations. That’s the technology to generate lots of models in a machine learning approach. In the early stages of an outbreak, there’s going to be relatively few data. We want to throw models at that data, even if it’s small data, to figure out how we can improve. | 
