SCIENCE AT THE EDGE SEMINAR

Friday, November 03,2006 at 11:30am
Room 1400 Biomedical and Physical Sciences Bldg.
Refreshments at 11:15

Speaker: Alessandro Vespignani
         Biocomplexity Institute, Indiana University

Title:   Epidemic spreading in complex networks

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.