Condensed Matter Seminar

Emergent disease spreading and complex networks

Prof. Alessandro Vespignani
Indiana University - Bloomington

Friday, November 10, 2006 - 4:00 P.M., NSH 184

Networks which trace the activities and interactions of individuals, social patterns, transportation fluxes and population movements on a local and global scale have been analyzed and found to exhibit complex features encoded in large scale heterogeneity, self-organization and other properties typical of complex systems. We review the impact of these complex features on the behavior of epidemic spreading processes and report on the effect of the heterogeneity of real world transportation networks in realistic models for the forecast of the large scale spreading of emerging diseases. The specific cases of SARS and pandemic influenza are analyzed.