A global collaboration to apply data science and artificial-intelligence (AI) methods to solve intractable problems in public health has been launched simultaneously in Sydney and Hong Kong (HK).

The Sydney hub was established thanks to $HK17 million ($3 million) in funding by InnoHK, a major initiative of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government.

The hub is part of the Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health, a joint project led by the University of Hong Kong in collaboration with the University of Sydney, University College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

The local Sydney hub is part of a global effort to build the Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health (D24H) under the AIR@InnoHK Cluster to collate and curate massive, unique data resources and develop novel, deep, frontier analytics in protecting global public health and improving individual health care through precision medicine.

Researchers in Sydney will work on projects, collaborating with the University of Hong Kong, to develop techniques in meta-genomics, a process that simultaneously sequences the genetic material of all organisms in a biological sample.