Welcome to PRCID 2026

Bacterial infections are the second-leading cause of death globally. Antimicrobial resistance threatens the effectiveness of modern healthcare and is recognized by the WHO as one of the top global public health threats. Infections also lead to significant economic costs, further motivating the urgent need to develop novel techniques for monitoring spread, develop accessible and accurate diagnostics, and tracking information spread and societal impact. These urgent challenges all require different forms of pattern recognition.

The PRCID 2026 workshop will covering three broad topics: (i) diagnostics based on biomedical image and video analysis, (ii) bioinformatics as a tool for surveillance and prediction of spread, and (iii) artificial intelligence for analysis of communication strategies and societal response.

Technical pattern recognition challenges central to each topic could for (i) for example be: DL for highly skewed datasets, rare case and anomaly detection, explainable AI, low computational demand networks for point of care diagnostics, real-time video analysis of pathogen growth, and domain adapted evaluation approaches. For (ii) for example: genomic sequence pattern analysis for resistance and emerging pathogen detection, GNNs for modeling transmission networks and co-occurrence networks for tracing resistance genes across populations, time series analysis of genomic data for modeling spread and mutations, and forecasting outbreaks. For (iii), for example: NLP for detection of misinformation patterns, information diffusion modeling, behavioural response analysis, and multi-modal AI for understanding how communication strategies affect the societal response in emergency situations.

This PRCID 2026 workshop is organized by Uppsala University, Sweden.