Complex techno-social networks and the spatial spread of infectious diseases

Interviene: Vittoria Colizza (Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation)

Organizzato da: Centro Dondena

Abstract: We live in an increasingly interconnected world where infrastructures composed by different technological layers are interoperating with the social component that drives their use and development. Their multi-scale nature and complexity represent crucial features for the understanding of these systems and of the dynamical processes occurring on top of them. In the case of the spatial spread of infectious diseases, the increasing abundance of data on social activities and movements opens new questions concerning the level of detail needed in large-scale computational models aimed at the realistic simulation of epidemic outbreaks. By focusing on the global epidemic and mobility (GLEaM) computational platform, I will study the role that different approximations and resolution scales have in the definition of the geotemporal spread of an epidemic provided by the models. Results open the path to the possibility for the definition of layered computational approaches where different modeling assumptions and granularities can be used consistently in a unifying multiscale framework for real-world applications.