Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), on behalf the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA; project number CB10190), hosts an annual intern- based web app development contest. Previous competitions have focused on mobile biosurveillance applications. The 2016 competition pivoted away from biosurveillance to focus on addressing challenges within the field of chemical surveillance and increasing public health chemical situational awareness. The result of the app will be integrated within the DTRA BSVE.
Objective
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory hosted an intern-based web application development contest in the summer of 2016 centered around developing novel chemical surveillance applications to aid in health situational awareness. Making up the three teams were three graduate students (n=9) from various US schools majoring in nonpublic health domains, such as computer sicence and user design. The interns successfully developed three applications that demonstrated a value-add to chemical surveillance—ChemAnalyzer (text analytics), RetroSpect (retrospective analysis of chemical events), and ToxicBusters (geo-based trend analytics). These applications will be the basis for the first chemical surveillance application to be incorporated into the DTRA Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE).