In an interview with Wired News on Thursday, Brilliant said his wish will be to ask the group to help establish a global early-detection and early-response system for infectious diseases, modeled after the Global Public Health Intelligence Network. GPHIN is an internet-based early warning system that gathers information on public health threats and delivers the information to the United Nations in seven languages.
"The best thing the TED community can do is to take our servers and search engines and venture capital and build something that can last forever that has international independence," Brilliant said. "The goal is to have the earliest possible warning of all bad things. Specifically that we find the first cases of pandemic bird flu, the first cases of new diseases like SARS or bioterror and we contain it with early response."
The Google foundation will be involved in the early-warning project, Brilliant said, adding that hundreds of Google employees, including engineers, are prepared to help set up the system. But he said his first step will be to recruit support from other companies and foundations, beginning with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The GPHIN uses an internet crawler to scan 20,000 websites in seven languages for events and chatter recorded online on blogs, news sites and other outlets that point to the early outbreak of diseases. Brilliant envisions a system that, with the help of companies like Google, Sun and Microsoft, will scan 20 million sites and deliver information in dozens of languages. The system would be housed in a neutral country, independent of any government or company. Data would be backed up in a separate place, under a different time zone to avoid outages.
Brilliant says the system could also be used to detect early signs of famine and environmental degradation and toxic spills.
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