Mobile phone data have recently offered new avenues to quantify human travel patterns with broad applications to epidemiology. But do they provide accurate and reliable descriptions of human movements for epidemic purposes? Through more than 650K simulations applied to France, we showed in a new paper that the adequacy of mobile phone data for infectious disease models becomes higher when epidemics spread between highly connected and heavily populated locations, such as large urban areas: mobile phones are more reliable in central regions than peripheral ones. 
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Assessing the use of mobile phone data to describe recurrent mobility patterns in spatial epidemic models
C Panigutti, M Tizzoni, P Bajardi, Z Smoreda, V Colizza
Royal Society Open Science 4, 160950 (2017).

We co-organize Contagion, a satellite meeting of the Conference on Complex Systems, the major annual international event gathering scientific communities engaged in Complex Systems research. Since 2012, the satellite brings together researchers from a broad range of disciplines (physics, mathematics, biology, epidemiology, human and veterinary medicine, computer science, information technologies, social sciences), focusing on the many challenges that the battle against infectious diseases is still facing in the XXI century.

The sixth edition of Contagion will be held within CCS2017 (Cancun, Mexico, September 17-22, 2017), with a particular attention to topics like vaccination strategies/immunization on networks, interacting strain dynamics, long-lived and persistent diseases, complex contagion, zoonotic spread, temporal transmission networks, human adaptation and multiple transmission routes/multiplex networks.

The workshop will be one day long and will host two invited talks (invited speakers are Marco Ajelli, Northeastern University, USA & Bruno Kessler Foundation, Italy, and Samuel Scarpino, University of Vermont, USA) and 12-15 contributed talks, selected by an international program committee. The call for abstracts is now open: abstracts need to be submitted via EasyChair. The deadline is May 20, 2017.

Contagion '17 – CCS'17 Satellite Meeting. Cancun, Mexico, September 2017.
Link: http://contagion17.weebly.com/