Computational Models and Simulations of Epidemic Infectious Diseases

The Data Exchange Podcast: Bruno Gonçalves on the world of epidemic models and the role they play in decision making.

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In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Bruno Gonçalves, a data scientist working at the intersection of Data Science and Finance. I have known Bruno for several years and we met when I recruited him to teach several extremely popular conference tutorials and talks on machine learning and deep learning. Prior to shifting over to data science, he spent several years as a researcher focused on mathematical models in Epidemiology – a field with a rich history dating as far back as the 1920s.  This episode is devoted to tools and techniques for modeling epidemics.

Our conversation covered:

• Bruno’s background and his experience in modeling epidemics.
• The field of epidemic models: what techniques are used, the size of the community of researchers, and how do models get evaluated.
• His two recent posts: “Epidemic Modeling 101 – Or why your CoVID-19 exponential fits are wrong” and  “Epidemic Modeling 102 – All CoVID-19 models are wrong, but some are useful”
• The role that epidemic models play in decision making.

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Related content:

• Edmon Begoli: “Hyperscaling natural language processing”
• Edo Liberty: “How deep learning is being used in search and information retrieval”
• Chris Nicholson: “Next-generation simulation software will incorporate deep reinforcement learning”
• Issue #6 of the Data Exchange Newsletter: “Life on Lockdown, Next-gen Simulation Tools, and the Misinformation Apocalypse”

For more on Epidemic Modeling, Bruno Gonçalves kindly sent over links to some of the leading researchers in the field:

• MOBS LAB group at Northeastern University headed by Alessandro Vespignani, the brains behind the large scale “GLEaM” platform.
• Vittoria Colizza at the Sorbonne in Paris.
• Betz Halloran focuses on modeling vaccination campaigns.
• Stefano Merler studies large scale agent based models (individually simulates the entire european union population).
• Ira Longini
• Cecile Viboud

[Image: Social Distancing by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay]