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Battling human disease - on a computer

4/26/2011

Technology advances and research results in a wide variety of disciplines is the theme of the 7th International Conference of Innovations in Information Technology -Innovation'11. This is an annual international conference organized by the Faculty of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), this year hosted in Abu Dhabi. Vittoria Colizza presented a keynote talk addressing the recent major advances in IT and data science that enable the detailed simulations of epidemics, pushing the predictive capabilities of data-driven modeling approaches.

The Confrenece also sees the contributions of other keynote speakers, among which David Cohn (Program Director, Smarter Cloud, IBM New York, in the photo), Mostafa Ammar (Georgia Tech), Athman Bouguettaya (CSIRO ICT Centre, Canberra, Australia), and Josef Davis (School of Information Technologies, The University of Sydney, Australia), discussing about the future of the Internet, from crowdsourcing to crowdservicing, to cloud technologies for smarter cities.

Colizza's research was featured on the newspaper The National (the UAE national newspaper): Battling human diseases - on a computer.

Young Advisor @EC, meeting with Neelie Kroes

4/15/2011

On April 13, Vittoria Colizza participated to a meeting with the Vice President of the European Commission Mrs Neelie Kroes as a Young Advisor for the new Digital Agenda for Europe, together with other 10 young Europeans involved in science, start-ups, government and civil society.

The meeting has been an exciting opportunity to discuss about the extraordinary advantages of making 'Every European Digital' and how to concretely put in action such plan by involving European citizens and addressing their needs.

We have discussed about: fast, rapid, and direct communication to bring the message to European citizens and explain how ICT is greatly and positively impacting our lives; ICT security, which needs to find an adequate balance to allow for the potentially infinitely large exploration of digital resources while preserving freedom and security; the need to involve citizens as true participants and main actors of this plan, not only as final users;the information/education of digitally responsible and empowered citizens; the urgent and always increasing need for data openness, to allow science to unlock its full value by strongly leveraging on ICT and create unprecedented knowledge.

The meeting was also a great opportunity to actively interact with other terrific and creative young experts. We keep our advising commitment to help planning for a Digital Europe, and the next event will be in Brussels on June 16-17, 2011, in occasion of the 1st Digital Agenda Assembly. Do you want to bring your idea for a better Digital Europe? Post a comment below!

If you want to read more, have a look at Mrs. Kroes's blog on the meeting.

New paper on ecotoxicological hazard in rivers due to pandemic response

4/10/2011

Assessing the exotoxicologic hazards of a pandemic influenza medical response
AC Singer, V Colizza, H Schmitt, J Andrews, D Balcan, WE Huang, VDJ Keller, A Vespignani, R Williams
Environmental Health Perspectives 119, 1084-1090 (2011).

Predicted toxicity maps. (a, b, c) Maps of the toxicity of the wastewater in WWTPs corresponding to three different scenario and the drugs usage patterns assuming no antiviral prophylaxis. Toxicity values for each wastewater treatment plant are binned and color coded according to the legend. Individual wastewater treatment plants are indicated by circles that re scaled to indicate the size of the population served by each plant. (d, e, f) Maps of the toxicity of the river stretches corresponding to the same scenarios. Toxicity values for each river stretch are binned and color-coded according to the legend.

New paper on mixing patterns in hospital ward

4/10/2011

Close encounters in a pediatric ward: measuring face-to-face proximity and mixing patterns with wearable sensors
L Isella, M Romano, A Barrat, C Cattuto, V Colizza, W Van den Broeck, F Gesualdo, E Pandolfi, L Rava, C Rizzo, AE Tozzi
PLoS ONE 6(2), e17144 (2011)

Contact matrices defined on the classes of individuals. Matrices are displayed for the number of contacts (panel A), the number of distinct contacts (panel B), and the cumulative time in contact (panel C). The matrix entry for classes X (row) and Y (column) is the median value of the node strengths for individuals of class X, computed on the contacts they had with individuals of class Y; the asymmetry of the matrices depends on the different numbers of individuals populating each class. Individuals of class X that did not have contacts with individuals of class Y count as nodes with zero strength, i.e., they affect the median value for the corresponding matrix entry. To increase the readability of the figure, matrix entries are grayscale-coded according to the median values, with the lightest and darkest shade of gray respectively corresponding to the minimum and maximum value for each matrix. Contact durations are expressed in minutes and normalized to a 24-hour interval.

GLEaMviz Simulator: new release and publication on software

4/10/2011

A new release of the GLEaMviz Simulator tool has been published! The software, publicly available, allows users to simulate realistic epidemic spreading scenarios at the global scale. The updated version offers an improved interface for the visualization of simulations' rsults: the number of new cases is displayed at the cell-level, instead of basin-level used in the previous versions, improving the spatial resolution. The visualization can be extensively customized by means of a graphical interface within the results window itself.

A paper discussing the GLEaMviz Simulator, including objectives and functionalities as well as implementation details, has just been published:

The GLEaMviz computational tool, a publicly available software to explore realistic epidemic spreading scenarios at the global scale.
Wouter Van den Broeck, Corrado Gioannini, Bruno Goncalves, Marco Quaggiotto, Vittoria Colizza, Alessandro Vespignani.
BMC Infectious Diseases, 11:37 (2011)

The paper details the software design and features, and includes a realistic application example. We are proud to note that the publication has acquired the "Highly accessed" badge by BioMed Central.

More informations on the epifor.eu website and at the gleamviz.org website.

New paper on travel-related interventions and 2009 H1N1 pandemic

4/10/2011

Travel-related and mobility restriction policies are often considered to be the first line of defence against the spread of an emerging infectious disease. The wide range of implementation scenarios of such policies calls for models that are able to anticipate their actual effectiveness. We tackle this problem in the recent publication:
Human mobility networks, travel restrictions and the global spread of 2009 H1N1 pandemic
Paolo Bajardi, Chiara Poletto, Jose J Ramasco, Michele Tizzoni, Vittoria Colizza, Alessandro Vespignani
PLoS ONE 6(1): e16591 (2011).

Taking advantage of the high detailed mobility data at the global level integrated in GLEaM, we assessed the impact of different travel reduction policies in the unfolding of the simulated pandemics. The work shows that feasible mobility limitations, highly disruptive in economic terms, generally are not effective: even with strong and lasting restrictions the delay achieved is limited to two weeks .

Have a look at the post on epifor.eu and the post gleamviz.org.

Battling human disease - on a computer

Young Advisor @EC, meeting with Neelie Kroes

New paper on ecotoxicological hazard in rivers due to pandemic response

New paper on mixing patterns in hospital ward

GLEaMviz Simulator: new release and publication on software

New paper on travel-related interventions and 2009 H1N1 pandemic

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