by Vittoria Colizza

I am proud and honored to be part of the I-7 Innovators’ Strategic Advisory Board on People-Centered Innovation. This is an engagement group launched during the G7 Summit in Taormina in May 2017. An experiment proposed by the Italian Government for the Italian G7 Presidency of 2017, its aim is to attract attention to the multi-faceted challenges that Innovation poses to Governments and Societies with a need for a concerted action across countries. ​

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Each country and the EU have designated their team of experts – a great honor and responsibility to be part of the Italian I-7 team of innovators! Our team is led by Diego Piacentini, Government Commissioner for the Transformation of the Digital Agenda for Italy – a super brilliant, extremely dynamic and unstoppable explosive mind. Diego is Senior Vice President at Amazon and he’s taken a leave of absence to take care of innovation in Italy, with the very ambitious goal of digitally transforming the public administration – a commitment that he’s taking one step at a time with an efficient and successful approach. There’s hope :)
I found myself in the mix of stimulating, challenging and exceptional brains - the rest of the team: Eric Ezechieli, co-founder of Nativa; Riccardo Sabatini, Chief Data Scientist at Orionis Biosciences; Thomas Ermacora, architect-urbanist, futurist & technologist; Raffaella Rumiati, Director of the iNSula lab at SISSA.

We were selected at the beginning of Summer 2017 and worked throughout Summer to prepare three documents on the Italian perspective around the following themes:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI). How can AI help governments make better decisions and deliver policies and services more effectively?
• Big Data: from regulation to active management. How can a more proactive approach to Big Data lead to smarter countries?
• The changing nature of society: the future of work. How could innovation help to deal with upcoming social and demographic changes?

 
I was assigned the Big Data challenge. In the month of September we received the contributions by G7 countries and we met with all I-7 Innovators to discuss these issues at the I-7 Day on September 25, a meeting taking place at Reggia di Venaria Reale, near Torino, together with the ICT and Industry Multistakeholder Conference and the opening of the Ministerial Meeting on ICT and Industry.
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It's been an awesome however challenging experience.
In one day and two sessions only (morning and afternoon), we presented and discussed the key points related to each theme, reaching a consensus across countries to propose practical action points for governments to address the Innovation challenges – all in real time! Our work was then summarized into the I-7 Chair Summary, the conclusions of the I-7 group, which was presented by Diego Piacentini to the Ministers at the end of the day and in occasion of the opening of the Ministerial Meeting on ICT and Industry. Here’s a glance at how the day went:

On November 10 we hosted in Paris the first workshop on livestock trade movements in Europe gathering representatives (modelers, network experts, veterinary scientists, animal health agency officials) from 14 countries. One day to discuss the results of the first comparative study of cattle trade systems that we are currently conducting, its epidemic implications and future perspectives.

Our results were also presented by our collaborator Akos Jozwiak from the Hungarian National Food Chain Safety Office at the meeting of EFSA, the European Food Safety Agency on November 23, spurring a large interest in the potential of network approaches to solve vet and food safety issues.
 
The lab is also looking for a PhD student to follow these research directions. If you’re interested, here’s the possibility to have a Master thesis financed in France (if you're a student in a French University), or please get in touch with Vittoria Colizza for a PhD (CV + statement of interest).

Summer appears to be just a warm memory but last week Epidemics 6 conference brought us in the ever-sunny Sitges, Spain. What an amazing experience! We really thank the organizers for this huge event.

 Here is a glimpse of our contribution to the conference:

We'll wait eagerly for the next edition and hope to swarm it again as we did this year!

​On November 9, 2017, the Institute of Complex Systems of Paris and Ile-de-France will inaugurate its new spaces, including a gorgeous brand new auditorium, with a day of Art and Science. Come and join us!

Program of the day.

Spoiler: the ISC auditorium will host NetSci 2018 School ;)

Almost 15 years after the start of Influenzanet in the Netherlands and Belgium, 10 European countries have joined the citizen science initiative to monitor influenza-like-illness in the general population.

A new paper reflects on this initiative addressing challenges and opportunities:

Influenzanet: Citizens Among 10 Countries Collaborating to Monitor Influenza in Europe
CE Koppeschaar, V Colizza, C Guerrisi, C Turbelin, J Duggan, WJ Edmunds, C Kjelsø, R Mexia, Y Moreno, S Meloni, D Paolotti, D Perrotta, E van Straten, AO Franco
JMIR Public Health Surveill 3(3):e66 (2017)

On Thursday June 22 I received the Erdős–Rényi Award by the NetSci Society in a special session at NetSci2017. The prize is awarded to a selected young scientist (under 40 years old on the day of the nomination deadline) for her/his achievements in research activities in the area of network science, broadly construed. While the achievements can be both theoretical and experimental, the prize is aimed at emphasizing outstanding contributions relevant to the interdisciplinary progress of network science.


Citation: For contributions to fundamental and data-driven network-based modeling of epidemic processes, including seminal studies on metapopulation systems, the impact of air transportation, and the predictability of epidemic outbreaks.
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It’s been an intense experience, full of joy, excitement, pride, and emotion, as I try to convey at the beginning of my speech (credits: Fil Menczer):

​It was also a very peculiar event for me as 10 years after I left Indiana University I was receiving a prize back in the very same place that acted as an incubator of the ideas I developed. IU rocks!

But beyond all this, I was surprised and overwhelmed by the feedback of the scientific community, expressed through the avalanche of tweets, the face-to-face interactions, the hugs, the empowering discussions in the ladies restrooms (yes, first female awardee! yay!), the so many emails, and the unexpected selfies (yes! I got requests for selfies! major achievement).

I was truly moved. So much that I felt the enormous pressure to write my very first tweet (!) to acknowledge all this and express my full gratitude.

THANKS!!!


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We just came back from NetSci2017 in Indianapolis, IN, US, such an awesome edition! A huge thanks to the Organizers for preparing such a terrific and record-breaking event.

• Vittoria Colizza was invited to present at the satellite meeting on Tuesday, showcasing our recent work on the epidemic threshold on temporal networks, from the theoretical approach (also the brand-new continuous one!) to possible applications to livestock diseases and nosocomial infections.​

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• Vittoria Colizza was part of the Professional Development Panel at the end of the SYNS on Tuesday, the first Symposium for the Society of Young Network Scientists. It was great occasion to discuss about different experiences with Alex Vespignani, Roberta Sinatra, Danielle Bassett, and Santo Fortunato (invited to join for gender balance ;) ). Thanks to the organizers!

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• There were 2 epidemics parallel sessions on Wednesday full of interesting talks. We contributed with a talk on bacterial strain richness in the hospital network by Francesco Pinotti (his first talk at NetSci, congratulations!!!)​ and a talk on vulnerability of the Italian cattle trade system to brucellosis by Vittoria Colizza with interesting discussions on illegal activities in the South of Italy.

• Great social dinner around Maths and Music, with a speech by Julian Hook (so stimulating and entertaining!) and a piano-violin concert together with Sun Huh – literally awesome, the audience was completely silent and totally captivated, have a look:

We are so proud to announce that Paris will host NetSci2018, the annual School and Conference in Network Science, next year in June!
 
Vittoria Colizza and Alain Barrat are the General co-Chairs, helped by a great team of collaborators. The webpage is up, have a look:
 
www.netsci2018.org

We are currently busy preparing the logistics and organizing the scientific program of the conference, follow us on twitter and facebook for upcoming news!

We just posted on the arxiv our new paper on the computation of the epidemic threshold for continuously time-evolving networks.

Epidemic threshold on continuous vs. discrete time evolving networks
E Valdano, M Re Fiorentin, C Poletto, V Colizza
arXiv:1706.05968​

 
The complex interplay between spreading dynamics on a network and underlying time-evolving topologies challenges our understanding of these phenomena. Specifically, contacts’ evolution impacts the conditions leading to the wide-spreading regime. In this work we introduce a novel theoretical framework for analytically predicting the epidemic threshold for any temporal network, extending the infection propagator approach (Valdano et al. Phys Rev X 2015) to continuous time evolving patterns. This allows us to go beyond previously used approximations, such as discretization, known to possibly bias results. We also provide an explicit solution applicable to contexts of interest and provide a mathematical formulation to reinterpret the widely used concept of annealing. Our findings offer the first systematic connection between the discrete and continuous formulations of spreading phenomena on arbitrary evolving networks.