Much as meteorologists predict the path and intensity of hurricanes, CNetS’ Alessandro Vespignani believes we will one day predict with unprecedented foresight, specificity and scale such things as the economic and social effects of billions of new Internet users in China and India, or the exact location and number of airline flights to cancel around the world in order to halt the spread of a pandemic. In the July 24 “Perspectives” section of the journal Science, Vespignani writes that advances in complex networks theory and modeling, along with access to new data, will enable humans to achieve true predictive power in areas never before imagined. This capability will be realized as the one wild card in the mix — the social behavior of large aggregates of humans — becomes more definable through progress in data gathering, new informatics tools and increases in computational power. More…

It’s a terrifying word. But what does it really mean? The outbreak of H1N1 is the latest deadly global battle between man and virus. As we learn more about how viruses mutate, an international effort is underway to vanquish humanity’s most lethal foes. CNetS’ Alessandro Vespignani to appear on Science Channel program about the “global battle between man and virus”.

GLEaM is a Global Epidemic and Mobility modeler that integrates sociodemographic and population mobility data in spatially structured stochastic disease models to simulate the spread of epidemics at the worldwide scale. The GLEaM team and its PI, Alex Vespignani, have been featured in many news reports about projections of the spread of H1N1 (Mexican flu). Read more about GLEaM…

Complex Networks Collaboratory

Cx-Nets  is a virtual collaboratory of three research groups that despite their far apart geographical locations pursue the same research agenda in close collaboration. Active research areas include:

• Network theory, structure and models
• Information Networks
• Epidemic modeling
• Social systems
• Infrastructures
• Biological networks

The Cx-Nets website is also intended as an information exchange point with links to conferences, tools and references useful for the network science community.

Alex Vespignani (PI)

Sandro Flammini

Fil Menczer

Research and Creativity Activity profiles research by CNetS faculty Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Vespignani and their groups in a special issue on networks. More…

Alex Vepignani

CNetS Professor Alex Vespignani has been elected to fellowship in the American Physical Society, the preeminent organization of physicists in the United States. Vespignani was honored for his contribution to the statistical physics of complex networks, in particular his seminal work on the spreading of viruses in real networks. More…

The National Institutes of Health has given $1.2 million to Indiana University researchers to build the ultimate international epidemic research tool. Principle investigators Katy Börner, Steven J. Sherman and Alessandro Vespignani will oversee the project, EpiC, which they hope will make the sharing and re-using of epidemics datasets and algorithms as easy as sharing videos via YouTube. The three researchers come from three distinct areas of the campus — the School of Library and Information Science, the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Informatics, respectively. Additional members of the evolving team are IU researchers Duygu Balcan, Weixia Huang and Bruce W. Herr. Read the full press release or more info and figures….

An Indiana University School of Informatics-led team of researchers have developed a mathematical model that can predict the spread and severity of a worldwide flu outbreak, giving health and public safety officials a leg up on where to dedicate their resources. Their report, published in the journal PLoS Medicine, describes several scenarios of flu virus pandemics and how best to contain them. The researchers show that strict travel restrictions would do little if anything to prevent the flu from spreading throughout the globe. Other measures could therefore be crucial, but it is likely that only a few countries will be able to stockpile supplies of drugs active against the virus. In these circumstances, compared with a ’selfish strategy’ in which countries use their antiviral drugs only within their borders, limited worldwide sharing of antiviral drugs would slow down the spread of a flu virus by many months, to the benefit of both drug donors and recipients. Marion County Health Department and Health Services at Eli Lilly and Co. comment on that.. More press and figures….