Title: Epidemic Spreading and Complex Networks

Presenter: Dr. Alessandro Vespignani
     School of Informatics, Department of Physics and
     Center for Biocomplexity, Indiana University.

Date and Time: Monday, October 16, 2006, 3:00-4:00PM

Abstract:
Networks which trace the activities and interactions of individuals, social patterns, transportation fluxes and population movements on a local and global scale have been analyzed and found to exhibit complex features encoded in large scale heterogeneity, self-organization and other properties typical of complex systems. We review the impact of these complex features on the behavior of epidemic spreading processes. We first discuss the general framework obtained for basic compartmental models (SIR, SIS) and review the results concerning the epidemic threshold and dynamical evolution of disease spreading processes in complex population networks. We then report on the effect of the heterogeneity of real world transportation networks in realistic meta-population models for the forecast of the large scale spreading of emerging diseases. The specific cases of SARS, and pandemic influenza are analyzed.
Seminar Location: The seminars are held at:
    Virginia Tech, Corporate Research Center
    1880 Pratt Drive, Building XV
    Seminar Room 2018, Second Floor
    Directions: Map (PDF)

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