Dr Denis Bauer is CSIRO’s Principal Research Scientist leading the Transformational Bioinformatics group. She is an internationally recognised expert in machine learning and cloud-based genomics, having keynoted AWS Summits (’18), Open Data Science Conference (India, ’18) and International conference on Bioinformatics (Indonesia ‘19). Her achievements include developing open-source machine-learning cloud services that are used by 10,000 researchers and contributing to Australia’s COVID-19 response.

Serverless in the fight against COVID-19

COVID-19 has highlighted the need to substantially improve disease preparedness to resolve this pandemic and avoid future ones. Digital health and the use of technology at large will be a key contributor to this preparedness.

This session talks about how CSIRO has leveraged cloud-native technologies to advance three areas of the COVID-19 response: firstly we developed a docker-based workflow to take identifying “fingerprints” of the virus strains for guiding vaccine developments and supporting molecular tracing of the origins from new outbreaks. Secondly, we developed a fully serverless web-service for tailoring diagnostics efforts, capable of differentiating between strains.

Thirdly, we are creating a serverless COVID-19 analysis platform that allows distributed genomics and patient data to be shared and analysed in a privacy- and ownership-preserving manner and functioning as an surveillance system for detecting more virulent strains early.