Auss Abbood

I am Auss, a first-gen immigrant from Iraq, cognitive scientist by training, sports enthusiast, and bass player. I have been working as a data scientist at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) since BC (before COVID-19) with a focus on digital epidemiology.

At the RKI I have been working on early detection of infectious diseases using natural language processing and time series analysis. During the pandemic, I was heavily involved in the German response against COVID-19. I was one of the founding members to develop Germany’s first national intensive care unit capacity monitoring system, the DIVI-Intensivregister working as a data scientist and data engineer. In 2022, I switched to the Information Centre for International Health Protection, where I was responsible for tracking international outbreak situations using epidemic modeling and data analysis. In all positions I produced reports and analyses for political and medical stakeholders. Outside of Germany, I have worked on capacity building in digital epidemiology in Southern Africa, Central Asia, and soon Southeast Asia..

In addition to my position at the RKI, I am involved in the The Focus Group on AI for Health, a partnership of ITU and WHO, where I have served as the topic group leader for outbreaks, working on standards for AI-based outbreak detection algorithms, and in the AI test specifications working group, helping other Focus Group members design and conduct tests for their AI systems.