Complex Systems Summer School 2015-Projects & Working Groups

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Ebola

The 2014-15 Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in West Africa presented both unique opportunities and unique challenges to the epidemiological modeling community. For the first time during an emerging infectious disease outbreak, high resolution data--from a variety of sources--were made available to the academic community and many public health decision makers genuinely engaged with mathematical and computational modelers. However, the popular and scientific press were highly critical of most models ability to project the outbreak's course. The following key and open questions seem ripe for investigation using a complex adaptive systems lens:
1) What features of EVD transmission are most problematic for reliable, robust forecasting: changing behavior, intervention, viral evolution, complex social networks, etc?
2) How/can we use digital data to either improve forecasts or inform model selection?
3) Can one quantify the value of additional information in real-time?
Contact: Samuel Scarpino, SFI Omidyar Fellow, Santa Fe Institute <scarpino@santafe.edu>