Microsoft Premonition will help governments detect biological threats in the environment

Microsoft Premonition was a Microsoft Research project with a goal of scalable monitoring of the environment to detect disease threats early, using robotics and genomics. Microsoft Premonition is a collection of technologies – hardware, software and services that enable biome monitoring.

Microsoft today announced that it is graduating Microsoft Premonition from a research project to commercial partnerships through its upcoming early access program. Microsoft Premonition will partner with top academic institutions through the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator Program. Microsoft Premonition is in active engagements with public and private health and services organizations both within the United States and globally.

More details about Microsoft Premonition:

• Microsoft Premonition is a system that aims to detect potential pathogens before they cause widespread outbreaks.
• The Microsoft Premonition technology stack consists of robotic platforms for monitoring and intelligently sampling disease carriers—such as mosquitoes—and cloud-scale metagenomics for genetically analyzing environmental samples collected by its sensor network for known and novel biological threats.
• The complete technology stack is designed to enable continuous monitoring and cost-effective prioritized sequencing of the environment.
• This data is analyzed in the Microsoft Premonition Cloud, a full Azure backend for aggregating and analyzing the multimodal data streams collected by Premonition systems (both IoT-style phenotypic data and metagenomic data).

Source: Microsoft