Introduction
To achieve sustainable reduction of the large endemic burden of infectious disease in the developing world, it is necessary to have timely, relevant and actionable data - to understand what interventions are likely to be effective, to target available resources for maximum impact, to monitor whether or not interventions are having the desired effect, and to alert control programmes when new problems emerge, e.g. new strains of drug resistant or virulent pathogens. Recent technological and scientific advances provide many opportunities to tackle these problems, e.g. with mobile data collection, genomic pathogen surveillance, cloud data platforms, novel statistical and machine learning methodologies, sophisticated mathematical models for decision support. The benefits of these recent advances are already being realised in rich countries, e.g. in the National Health Service.