LAUSR

To the Editor — On 26 May, President Joe Biden called on the US Intelligence Community to redouble efforts to collect and analyse information on the origins of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and report back to him in 90 days. After more than 18 months of intensive global investigations, the deadline will put pressure on a task that is proving to be substantially more challenging to solve than the origins of other threats1. I want to offer some technical considerations on the vast — but not insurmountable — complexity of the task ahead. My advice builds on a decade of experience leading teams that participated in2, designed3 and analysed4 challenges involving the time-critical search for hard-to-find information entities. I also borrow insights from my field of study, network science, which has tackled the theoretical5 and empirical6,7 aspects of searching for rare information spreading on a network. A successful investigation will, I believe, benefit from implementing five principles: incentive structures, transparency, unbiased search, crowdsourcing and human–machine computational sense-making.