Last week I attended the workshop Algorithms in the Field or “8F”, as its puzzling acronym turns out to be. David Eppstein published comprehensive notes on the talks on his blog:
I like to think that I’m doing “8F” in my global health job, and also some algorithms in the forest, algorithms in the desert, etc. But this workshop gave me a chance to think about the connection to Algorithms with a capitol “A”, the kind going on in the theory group of the ivory towered computer science department. I’ve been pretty successful at coming up with little challenges in global health where algorithmic thinking is useful (e.g. Doctors = Noise Machines), and I’m going to try to use the blog to throw more of these puzzles over the fence in the next few weeks. My barrier to doing this in the past has been the amount of background research I need to do to avoid sounding foolish. But my writing style was never suited to caution. Let’s see how it goes. I hope that even half-explained connections between Algorithms and global health will inspire some algorithmitician to fill in the details.
What I challenge myself to do more of is to go beyond the little puzzles, and synthesize something bigger to ask from algorithmists. What algorithmic innovation would really change how we’re doing things in Global Health? This is a domain where avoiding foolishness is even more of a recipe for silence. But I will try.
On my mind now: the computation time necessary to fit a model. 20 seconds, 20 minutes, or 20 hours is a really big difference. More on that thought to come.
Question to readers from Global Health Departments, what do you think capitol-A algorithms researchers can offer us?
Healthy Algorithms 