Tag Archives: epidemic modeling

Truthy tool identifies smear tactics on Twitter

October 25, 2010Fil, NaN, Newsepidemic modeling, information networks, NaN, politics, Twitterfil

Astroturfers, Twitter-bombers and smear campaigners need beware this election season as a group of leading Indiana University information and computer scientists today unleashed Truthy.indiana.edu, a sophisticated new Twitter-based research tool that combines data mining, social network analysis and crowdsourcing to uncover deceptive tactics and misinformation leading up to the Nov. 2 elections. Combing through thousands of tweets per hour in search of political keywords, the team based out of IU’s School of Informatics and Computing will isolate patterns of interest and then insert those memes (ideas or patterns passed by imitation) into Twitter’s application programming interface (API) to obtain more information about the meme’s history.

In the run-up to the mid-term elections, Truthy uncovered a number of abuses such as robot-driven traffic to politician websites and networks of bot accounts controlled by individuals to promote fake news. These findings have been widely covered in the press, with mentions in The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, PC World, New Scientist, NPR, Ars Technica, Fast Company, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, and many other media. Read more here and here.

CNetS team shows new levels of refinement in predicting human mobility, epidemic spread

December 18, 2009Newsepidemic modeling

The interplay of human mobility patterns like those between local metropolitan commuters and long-range airline travelers during a global epidemic can be modeled in such detail so as to offer refined views of epidemics that could aid in public health emergency decision making, according to new research published by Professor Alessandro Vespignani’s research team at Indiana University. The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences‘ Online Early Edition, also note that with these refined computational strategies, new levels of accuracy about the behavior of targeted mobility networks and epidemic progression can be imagined. Contributing with Vespignani on the paper were research scientists Duygu Balcan and Bruno Goncalves of the IU School of Informatics and Computing, and the Pervasive Technology Institute, IU Physics Department graduate student Hao Hu and research scientists Vittoria Colizza and Jose Ramasco of the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Torino, Italy. More…

Technology on way to forecasting humanity’s needs, Vespignani reports in Science

July 29, 2009Newsepidemic modelingtgholbro

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…

Anatomy of a Pandemic: Vespignani on the Science Channel

May 29, 2009Newsepidemic modeling, pandemicfil

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”.

Swine flu: Statistical model predicts spread in US, worldwide

April 28, 2009NewsCx-Nets, epidemic modelingfil

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…

Spotting the Patterns that Information Makes

April 1, 2009Fil, NaN, Newsbookmarking, Cx-Nets, epidemic modeling, folksonomy, givealink, information networks, NaN, socialfil

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 Vespignani named a Fellow in the American Physical Society

December 4, 2008Newscomplex networks, Cx-Nets, epidemic modelingfil

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…

$1.2 million NIH project will help track and predict epidemics

April 28, 2008Newsepidemic modeling, NIH

us_1march 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….

IU team has pulse on pandemic preparation

January 23, 2007Newsepidemic modeling

us_1march 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….