Auss Abbood

I am Auss, a first-gen immigrant from Iraq, cognitive scientist by training, sport enthusiast, and bassist. Since October 2024, I am a PhD student with Prof Nigel Collier at the Language Technology Lab. There, I am exploring how large language models (LLMs) can be utilized for digital disease surveillance. I am specifically interested in LLMs’ capability to help integrate various pieces of information like texts, maps, or mobility for their reasoning. Right now, I am looking into their capability to understand temporal relationships in structured data.

Before my PhD, I have been working as a data scientist at the Robert Koch Institute informing political and medical stake holders. There, I have been working on early detection of infectious diseases using natural language processing and time series analysis. I was in the founding team that developed Germany’s first surveillance system for intensive care unit capacities, the DIVI-Intensivregister. Later, I was responsible to track international outbreak situations, using epidemic modelling and data analyses. Outside of Germany, I worked on capacity building in digital epidemiology in Southern Africa and Central Asia.