Ever wonder how you could use your computer science skills to stop the next pandemic, but don't know where to start.
In a new post, I provide an introduction into viral biosurveillance and the computational problems that come with it.
Nov 3, 2025 · 4:46 PM UTC
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A useful lens for thinking about biology is through measurement: both what your are measuring, and how you're measuring it.
Using this lens, we can work our way to untargeted metagenomic sequencing, a promising route for novel viral biosurveillance.
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With this technology in mind, I then walk through how we can conceptually go from some sample to viral identification.
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As with most problems, there is a lot practical engineering that comes into play. For biosurveillance with untargeted metagenomics, it's predominantly dealing with terabytes of data, making tools work together, and validating classification without any ground truth.
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Lastly, I provide some resources, including a list of open computational problems outside of the space of surveillance.
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If any of this sounds interesting to you, you can read my post below which goes in much further detail.
harm0n.com/blog/cs-pandemic-…
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